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After the surprising award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama, the second most surprising Nobel award might well be to one of the co-winners for economics - Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University. Ostrom is a political scientist. She is also a brilliant scholar who has delved into an area that seems esoteric, but is of considerable value the world over.
Ostrom's research has focused on the management of what we call "common pool resources" - open grazing land, fisheries and similar resources that, if over-exploited, can be so depleted they are unsustainable. When they collapse, nobody benefits. This describes what Garrett Hardin famously called the "tragedy of the commons."
Traditional wisdom has often divided the solution to these problems into two categories. Some argue that privatizing resources makes people better stewards - thus, if all the grazing land or forests or fishing rights were privatized, people would take care to manage them sustainably. In many cases, this hasn't really worked out. Others, however, argue that neither have heavy-handed command-and-control methods of regulating fisheries or pollution (air and water, after all, are common resources).
Ostrom found a third way: When people, acting in communities, come together to address overexploitation, they can work together to create sustainable systems that allow people to use - but not abuse - the resource. In other words, left to their own devices, communities can decide how to manage these resources without privatizing them or heavy handedly controlling them. I find this message hopeful.
As I political scientist, I find Ostrom's research has been valuable in showing that classical economic theory is one way - but only one way - to explain how people allocate scarce resources. Another way, in the words of Harold Lasswell, a famous political scientist, is through politics, which is the study of "who gets what, when, and how." Indeed, both economics and politics are different ways of thinking about how goods and other things are allocated in societies.
It is particularly interesting that this sophisticated and important research won the Nobel the week after U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla, introduced an amendment to strip the National Science Foundation of funding to support political science research. Political "science," argues Coburn, is a misnomer, and what political scientists do could easily be replicated, he claims, by CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC or other purveyors of punditry.
Coburn's comments reveal a deep ignorance of what political scientists, and social scientists in general, do. For example, the NSF funds the National Election Survey, which goes far beyond the snap polls and horse-race coverage of elections, to dig into why people vote at all, and why they vote the way they do. In a democracy, this is worth knowing. The most recent NSF grant in this field goes to a team studying "commons problems" - the very class of problems for which Ostrom was recognized.
I will admit I have a stake in this debate, although I've never been funded by the political science program. Anyone can cherry-pick titles of projects that sound esoteric, impractical or silly. More enlightened observers will review the span of funded and unfunded research and conclude that some things are worth learning, and that, some day, this knowledge will contribute to a better society.
On those grounds, the Bank of Sweden conferred its highest award on a political scientist who studies economics. Probably unintentionally, it sent a signal to Coburn that ill-informed, ideologically motivated attacks on science and scholarship reflect poorly, not on science, but on the attacker. More important, it recognizes that those of us in the ivory tower do contribute to understanding important issues of the day. And now I need to brush up on my economics - since even a political scientist can now win a Nobel.
