Elinor Ostrom podcast

This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season two, episode two. Ostrom was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, and her work directly challenges one of the most famous ideas students encounter on the spec: the tragedy of the commons. Through decades of fieldwork she showed that communities frequently develop their own rules and norms to manage shared resources sustainably, without needing either privatisation or government regulation. It’s an important corrective to the standard textbook framing of the tragedy of the commons as a binary between markets and the state. A nice addition to market failure content and accessible to all students: the tragedy of the commons is spec material, so this episode works well as a complement to, or critique of, the standard treatment.  Listen here