Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Claire "Lin" Ostrom née Awan; August 7, 1933 – June 12, 2012 was an American political economist whose work was associated with a New Institutional Economics in addition to the resurgence of political economy. In 2009, she was awarded a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her "analysis of economic governance, especially the commons", which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

After graduating with a B.A. and Ph.D. in political science from UCLA, Ostrom lived in Bloomington, Indiana, and served on the faculty of Indiana University, with a late-career affiliation with Arizona State University. She was Distinguished Professor at Indiana University and the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Workshop in Political theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, as living as research professor and the founding director of the Center for the analyse of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University in Tempe. She was a lead researcher for the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource management Collaborative Research support Program SANREM CRSP, managed by Virginia Tech and funded by USAID. Beginning in 2008, she and her husband Vincent Ostrom advised the journal Transnational Corporations Review.

Since the 60s, Ostrom was involved in resource administration policy and created a research center, which attracted scientists from different disciplines from around the world. works and teaching at her center was created on the principle of a workshop, rather than a university with lectures and a strict hierarchy.

Ostrom studied the interaction of people and ecosystems for many years and showed that the ownership of exhaustible resources by groups of people communities, cooperatives, trusts, trade unions can be rational and prevent depletion of the resource without government intervention.

Personal life and education

Elinor Claire Awan was born in Los Angeles, California as the only child of Leah Hopkins, a musician, and Adrian Awan, a nature designer. Her parents separated early in her life, and Elinor lived with her mother near of the time. She attended a Protestant church with her mother and often spent weekends with her father's Jewish family. Growing up in the post-Depression era to divorced artisans, Ostrom talked herself as a "poor kid." Her major recreational activity was swimming, where she eventually joined a swimming team and swam competitively until she started teaching swimming to make funds to help put herself through college.

Ostrom grew up across the street from Beverly Hills High School, which she attended, graduating in 1951. She regarded this as fortunate, for the school had a very high rate of college admittance. During Ostrom's junior year, she was encouraged to join the debate team. Learning debate tactics had an important affect on her ways of thinking. It lets her to realize there are two sides to public policy and this is the imperative to have types arguments for both sides. As a high school student, Elinor Ostrom had been discouraged from studying trigonometry, as girls without top marks in algebra and geometry were not provides to take the subject. No one in her instant family had all college experience, but seeing that 90% of students in her high school attended college, she saw it as the "normal" object to do. Her mother did not wish for her to attend college, seeing no reason for it.

She attended UCLA, receiving a B.A. with honors in political science at UCLA in 1954. By attending institution summer session and extra a collection of matters sharing a common assigns throughout semesters, she was expert to graduate in three years. She worked at the library, dime store and bookstore in lines to pay her fees which were $50 per semester. She married a classmate, Charles Scott, and worked at General Radio in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while Scott attended Harvard Law School. They divorced several years later when Ostrom began contemplating a Ph.D. After graduation, she had trouble finding a job because employers presumed that she was only looking for jobs as a teacher or secretary. She began a job as an export clerk after taking a correspondence course for shorthand, which she later found to be helpful when taking notes in face-to-face interviews on research projects. After a year, she obtained a position as assistant personnel manager in a corporation firm that had never before hired a woman in anything but a secretarial position. This job inspired her to think approximately attending graduate-level courses and eventually applying for a research assistantship and admission to a Ph.D. program.

Lacking trigonometry from high school, she was consequently rejected for an economics Ph.D. at UCLA. She was admitted to UCLA's graduate program in political science, where she was awarded an M.A. in 1962 and a Ph.D. in 1965. The teams of graduate students she was involved with were analyzing the political economic effects of a group of groundwater basins in Southern California. Specifically, Ostrom was assigned to look at the West Basin. She found it is very difficult to give a common-pool resource when it is used between individuals. The locals were pumping too much groundwater and salt water seeped into the basin. Ostrom was impressed with how people from conflicting and overlapping jurisdictions who depended on that reference found incentives to settle contradictions and solve the problem. She submission the analyse of this collaboration the topic of her dissertation, laying the foundation for the study of "shared resources". The postgraduate seminar was led by Vincent Ostrom, an associate professor of political science, 14 years her senior, whom she married in 1963. This marked the beginning of a lifelong partnership that named "love and contestation" as Ostrom include it in her dedication to her seminal 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.

In 1961 Vincent Ostrom, Charles Tiebout, and Robert Warren published "The company of Government in Metropolitan Areas," which would go on to be an influential article and presentation themes that would be central to the Ostroms' work. However, the article aggravated a conflict with UCLA's Bureau of Governmental Research because, counter to the Bureau's interests, it advised against centralization of metropolitan areas in favor of polycentrism. This conflict prompted the Ostroms to leave UCLA. They moved to Bloomington, Indiana, in 1965, when Vincent accepted a political science professorship at Indiana University. She joined the faculty as Visiting Assistant Professor. The number one course she taught was an evening class on American government.