![]() “Macroeconomics behaves like we’re doing physics after the quantum revolution, that we really understand at a fundamental level the forces around us,” said Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in an interview. The ways that millions of people bounce off one another - buying and selling, lending and borrowing, intersecting with governments and central banks and businesses and everything else around us - amount to a system so complex that no human fully comprehends it. ![]() It is vivid evidence that macroeconomics, despite the thousands of highly intelligent people over centuries who have tried to figure it out, remains, to an uncomfortable degree, a black box. “That was just not what her work was about.In effect, many of the key ideas underlying economic policy during the Great Moderation - the period of relatively steady growth and low inflation from the mid-1980s to 2007 that also seems to be a high-water mark for economists’ overconfidence - increasingly look to be at best incomplete, and at worst wrong. “In economics, every successive cohort of economists is trained to put greater emphasis on the arsenal of mathematical and econometric expertise,” Professor Folbre said. “She would go and actually talk to Indonesian fisherman, or Maine lobstermen, and ask, ‘How did you come to establish this limit on the fish catch? How did you deal with the fact that people might try to get around it?’ ” said Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a contributor to The New York Times’s Economix blog. ![]() In 1964, when she was working on her dissertation, fieldwork was considered the province of anthropologists, not academics trying to answer economic questions. She received her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees - all in political science - at the University of California, Los Angeles.Īs a researcher she was notable for conducting fieldwork, an unusual method that is admired by some economists but scorned by others. She recalled helping her family grow food in a large garden and knitting scarves for soldiers. She often spoke about how growing up in the Depression had influenced her interest in cooperative institutions. Her work has important applications for climate change policy today.Įlinor Awan was born on Aug. Professor Ostrom studied cases around the world in which communities successfully regulated resource use through cooperation. This is the so-called tragedy of the commons, and it suggests that common resources must be managed either through privatization or government regulation, in the form of taxes, say, or limits on use. Traditionally, economics taught that common ownership of resources results in excessive exploitation, as when fishermen overfish a common pond. Just as her academic habits emphasized collaboration and cooperation, so did the content of her study. It would become the first of several interdisciplinary institutions she helped shape, and a locus for her collaboration with scholars across academia, including ecologists, computer scientists and psychologists. In 1973, Professor Ostrom and her husband, Vincent, who survives her, founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. ![]() Eventually she and her husband just created their own center for it.” “She had experienced many of these challenges over the years. “A lot of important questions are on the narrow borders between disciplines, but it is difficult to find a home for that kind of work,” said Marco Janssen, a mathematician at Arizona State University who collaborated with Professor Ostrom.
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