 Hi, I'm Jamie Lemke and I'm a senior fellow in the Hayek program. Hi, I'm Bobby Herzberg. I'm a distinguished senior fellow in the Hayek program and Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Hi, I'm Pete Betke. I'm a university professor of economics and philosophy here at George Mason University and the director of the FA Hayek program for advanced study in philosophy, politics and economics at the Mercatus Center. I'm here today to talk a little bit about Eleanor Ostrom because it's the 10-year anniversary of her winning the Nobel Prize in economics. And I think it really speaks to the importance of Lynn and her contribution across the social sciences both as a woman and as a very careful and collaborative scholar. So if I had to sum up Eleanor Ostrom's contribution in just a brief phrase, I'd probably say that there's no one-size-fits-all solutions. I think the main contribution that Eleanor Ostrom made to economic science was to explore the foundations of human sociability. So I think she demonstrated that you didn't have to be one dimensional, that you could be multi-dimensional in the way that you approached it, and that if you continued to work hard even when people were trying to discourage you from continuing down a path you could really break through. And I think that's what the Nobel Prize committee saw in her work. One of the stories that always sticks with me in terms of her academic contributions and the way that maybe being able to make those was complicated by the fact that she was a woman is at UCLA, her initial, the denial of her application to be in that economics PhD program. I think it required a very special personality and diligence that I think is hard for, at least it would be very hard for me to keep going given all the barriers that she faced. But I think the fact that someone could have been told no by the establishment and then go on to do so much at the level of actually winning this profession's highest award, I think it's a good lesson, the lesson I take from it is to be open and to listen because she was a lifelong learner, but also to not listen too much, especially when people try to close doors for you. The difference was Lynn was driven by the work and by the beliefs that the work was so important and by the support of her husband, her spouse, Vincent Ostrom and her colleagues at the workshop. And so if I was to say to a young economist or young political scientist, what could I learn from Eleanor Ostrom's example? It would be one, follow your curiosity and allow that curiosity to guide you. Two, have tremendous perseverance and grit in pursuing your curiosity. And three, take advantage of whatever opportunities that are created by others to lower those roadblocks that you face and then when you or yourself are in position of power do what's in your ability to do to lower those roadblocks or impediments that face younger scholars that are coming up that are also similarly discriminated against either because of their characteristics or their ideas. One of the things that I think is most unique about her work is the fact that she went out into the field so much. Really going out into these places and into these communities, talking to people and really learning what their constraints were on the ground and the situation that faced them on the ground was something really important to bring to this institutional economics conversation. What Eleanor Ostrom brought to that conversation that I think was exceptional was that she really wanted to look at rule systems as this holistic framework and try to understand them from the bottom all the way up to the top in their full institutional detail. She taught me about what was different about institutions. It was that you could not leave out all of these other factors that were coming in. It was going to be complex distilling it down to its most abstract form while useful as a first cut would not be adequate in the end. And so she set out to say, I think we need to incorporate these and I'm going to find a way that I can analytically do this with some precision and some care but still keep the complexity and all of the sort of interesting nuance that she brings. She gave us a sense of institutions that was significantly richer yet still analytically precise and careful and so I think that's really how it differed. So an idea that both Eleanor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom really stressed was going beyond dichotomies, going beyond the binaries. So one of the ways they tried to begin to break down that dichotomy was to bring in these alternative typologies of goods like the common pool and common pool resources and like club goods. So I viewed that transformation and changing boundary rules and coming up with different creative ways to enforce exclusion that's part of her project but I would say it doesn't encompass the entire project that there are also many different types of ways in which rules are created and resources are dealt with. It was really important to them. I think they thought of people first. You needed to understand one of the things that they discovered and field studies for example when you went out into the field you realized there were lots of other things people brought to that decision setting that you had not anticipated. Maybe someone's uncle had irritated your family in a past period and so in that circumstance they weren't going to agree and no matter what your theory said and so their focus on real people and all of the things that they bring allowed them to look at the institution from the perspective of that person and not from a top down how what are the best rules for some on average person and so I think that became really important as they see like a citizen and not like a state. One of her last projects was to try to have a collaboration between us here at George Mason University her team at the workshop at University of Indiana or Indiana University and also at Arizona State University and the center that was being formed there for complexity and the human sciences and evolution. One of the things that the governing the commons is such an important book for is looking at how people in situations of extreme social conflict or the potential for extreme social conflict nevertheless find through their creativity through their diligence through their cleverness institutional fixes so that we turn that situation of conflict into the opportunity for cooperation and that's her real lasting legacy is how it is not that people resolve social situations perfectly or harmoniously by magic but how real people being creative being clever being industrious are able to come up with solutions to problems that allow them to stumble through and live better together than they ever could in isolation with one another and it's that project and how that's the foundation for a self governing democratic society in which we govern with each other rather than allowing anyone to govern over us is the lasting legacy I think of Lynn's Nobel Prize her life as a scholar and what I hope that people continue to work on for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years in living through the legacy that she set for all of us on how to be a lifelong learner and a social scientist of consequence.