Was it really economics?
April 8th 2010 06:54
The 76-year-old American academic was one of a record five women to win Nobel prizes last year and the first ever woman to win an economics prize, but that is not what was controversial. The arm-flapping comes from traditionalists who label the work of Ostrom as social science rather than strict economics.
The Nobel citation pointed to her research into "economic governance, especially the commons", and judges noted how she "challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatised".
What Ostrom's work has attempted to show is that common resources like forests and fisheries are best exploited if the rules and regulations are set by their users rather than by government.
However, according to Professor Steven Levitt, of the University of Chicago, "The economics profession is going to hate the prize going to Ostrom. Economists want this to be an economists' prize. This (2009) award demonstrates ... that the prize is moving toward a Nobel in social science, not a Nobel in Economics."
Ostrom herself acknowledges the distinction. "I've crossed disciplines, there's no question about it," she said.
We can not defer to the wisdom of Alfred Nobel on the issue, because he did not provide for an economics prize in his 1895 will. The prize was created, in his memory, in 1968 by the Swedish central bank.
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