 Hello, my name is Jamie Lemke. I'm a senior research fellow and associate director of academic and student programs at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. And I'm here with Pete Betke, professor of economics and a professor of philosophy at George Mason University. He's also the director of the FA Hayek program for advanced study in philosophy politics and economics and the vice president of research at the Mercatus Center at GMU. His most recent book is living economics yesterday, today and tomorrow. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today, Pete. It's wonderful to be here with you, Jamie. So we wanna talk today about the Bloomington School of Institutional Analysis and Public Choice and the work of Vincent and Eleanor Ostrom. Can you just tell me a little bit about what that is? Oh, well, Vincent Ostrom was a professor at UCLA. He also worked in the Alaskan Constitution, but he was involved in, particularly in a project having to do with water rights. In California, and he worked at a sort of a water resource center at UCLA. And Eleanor Ostrom, who was a graduate student at that time, she worked her dissertation on water rights in California. Actually, it's very relevant because think about what's going on in California today. Yeah, and both of them. And they moved to the University of Indiana, Indiana University in the 1960s, early 1960s. And they were part of a broad program in political science that was going on at that time internationally on applying basically methodological individualism or what we might call today rational choice modeling to the area of politics, which previous to that had been dominantly done in economics. And so Jim Buchanan at the University of Virginia and Gordon Tullak, his colleague, had published the Calculus of Consent in 1963, is that correct, or 62? And then they started a group called the Committee on Non-Market Decision Making. And Vincent was one of those original members of that which became the Public Choice Society. And both Vincent and Lynn had served as president at respective times at a public choice society, as well as earning rather large accolades in the field of political science more generally. And then Lynn, of course, was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. So that's sort of a quick history of their accolades. Now their content of their ideas is Vincent very much wanted to both Vincent and Eleanor were very enthralled with the Tocquevillian idea of self-governing democracies. And what are the institutions and also capacities of citizens required to be self-governing citizens? And so they started a project and it was called the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. And one of the big ideas in Vincent's entire body of work is the connection between words and deeds, okay? And so words really, really mattered for Vincent and for Eleanor. And so the choice of the term workshop has a meaning to it that it doesn't have an other ordinary sort of ideas. A lot of schools say, oh, we're gonna go to the workshop and we do seminars or whatever, but they chose as the name of their center, the workshop. And the reason for that was that they believed that young scholars were entering into an apprenticeship in the same way that you enter into an apprenticeship with a master craftsman. Eventually their approach became known as the Institutional Analysis of Development or the Bloomington School for Institutional Analysis and Development because the insights that they had about the working of a self-governing democracy then spread to the working of self-governing democracies abroad and everywhere in self-sustaining social orders. So like the way I like to describe Lynn's work is that, and Lynn and Vincent is that they did rational choice theory as if the choosers were human and they did institutional analysis as if history matters. So they didn't just pluck these things out of thin air and so you have to contextualize that. And so by understanding what Vincent means by democracy, which is the way we relate to one another, not voting, it's an issue of relating, you know? Where there's no sovereign over us, right? So the idea is it's a society with neither dominion nor discrimination. It's actually a very inspiring vision about how the way human societies could work with one another. And again, as I said before, it puts a lot of power in the people, the local people to be able to resolve their difficulties. The other thing that's fascinating about both Lynn and Vincent is that they embraced paradoxes, anomalies and tensions. They didn't run away from them. And so as social scientists, what they wanted to do was have you think about the paradoxes, the puzzles, the tensions. Not only think about worlds that are smooth, right? And, you know, as my one colleague, Dick Wagner, likes to say, functions that are smooth and continuous and twice differentiable. You know, that's like an easy world to study. They wanted to talk about how do we resolve conflicts when we start in a world rife with conflict but yet we somehow find rules that we can cooperate with one another. Even though, you know, we have all these possible tensions, possibilities of cheating, possibilities of, you know, shirking, possibilities of, you know, kind of literally like, you know, free riding. You know, so she says, one of the things that was most funny about Lynn is she says most other people that worked on collective action problems. Like say, for example, the great Mansur Olson. She said, if you read Mansur Olson's book, it was wrong, it was titled the wrong way. So Mansur Olson's book is called the logic of collective action. And her argument says, if you actually read Olson closely, what he gave us was a logical collective inaction. Right? And what you should have is a logical how collective action. Cause what did he show? He showed areas where because of the collective action problem, it all breaks down. You can't voluntarily solve the issue. Whereas with her, she sees all the ways, and Vincent, the ways in which groups come together to resolve these conflicts and, you know, whatnot.