 Good afternoon. Thank you very much for coming. Let's come to order, please. So afternoon, I'm Michael Lash, Chair of the Department of Economics. And welcome, Provost Staros, alumni, students, colleagues, guests. Let me begin very simply. Eleanor Ostrom, our speaker today, is an intellectual giant. Professor Ostrom rejected the bleak allure of the so-called tragedy of the commons and the implied Hobson's choice between privatization and authoritarianism. On the contrary, Ostrom observed that the earth is full of sustained and functional commons in which the institutions of the commons help people to cooperate and to act collectively to promote the general welfare. Professor Ostrom defined an alternative theory of the commons and perhaps is, importantly, a meticulous and reproducible method to document, and maybe even more importantly, to equip her students and their students in turn. Maybe there's a lesson here about a sustainable intellectual commons working somewhere. To document case after case of successfully maintained commons from forestry in South Asia to irrigation systems in the Southwestern US, really, around the world. Her work and that of her students has transcended mere documentation, although that's, as I said, has been rigorous and meticulous. The academic research has become one of the bulwarks of commons' maintenance. Professor Ostrom is distinguished professor, Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science and Senior Research Director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. She's also the founding director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University. She's a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Her list of publications redefines entire disciplines. I won't list it here. Her list of prizes is as long as many distinguished professors' lists of publications. One prize is especially noteworthy. Eleanor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, becoming the first woman to do so in the 40-year history of the award. In its recognition of her work, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted, Eleanor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. So it's indeed a pleasure to welcome her to the University of Massachusetts. This afternoon, Professor Ostrom will deliver the 2011 Gamble Lecture, give me a hand of us, 2011 Gamble Lecture of the Department of Economics. The Philip Gamble Memorial Lectureship Endowment was established by Israel Rugosa, class of 1942, another example of paying it forward, and other families and friends in memory of Philip Gamble, a member of the economics faculty from 1935 to 1971, who chaired the department from 1942 to 1965. The fund supports an annual lecture series featuring a prominent economist, previous speakers have included five previous Nobel Prize winners, all male, I think, Jean-Cath Galbraith, Barbara Bergman, Lonnie Guinear, Robert Reich, Robert Schiller, Danny Roderich, a long list, most recently financial journalist Gretchen Borgensen. This afternoon, we are honored by the presence of members of the Rugosa family, Marty and Elizabeth Rugosa. Thank you, thank you for coming. Marty is a 1979 graduate of the Eisenberg School and the steward of the Philip Gamble Memorial Lectureship. Elizabeth is a 1988 zoology graduate. Thank you, welcome and thank you truly for attending. The Gamble Lectureship is also supported by the Charles L. and Martha S. Gleason Fund. Charles and Martha were economics graduates in 1940 and 1942. Both are now deceased, but their legacy lives on. In 2005, 2006, the University of Massachusetts Amherst sponsored a series of lectures and conversations until the Forum on Social Wealth to think about the commons and the new light, shown by Professor Ostrom. We developed these lectures into an undergraduate course, Econ 105, Introduction to Political Economy, recommended to all of our undergraduates. While we were developing the class, we looked for a voice who would deliver the last word in the course and we chose Eleanor Ostrom. So please join me in giving her the last word once again and welcoming Professor Ostrom. Well, thank you very, very much for inviting me. I much, much appreciate the invitation and I've had some wonderful discussions with colleagues and students here and it's just been great. So I enjoy it and it's a somewhat controversial position I'll take and so I won't be upset if some people wanna challenge it, but we'll talk about it. So I think we have to agree that climate change is the largest commons. Pardon me? Okay, can you hear me now? Okay, so we're dealing with a very large commons that I will argue in a few minutes. It's not normal very correctly, but the I am asked repeatedly if what we've learned from fisheries and water systems, et cetera, has an automatic relevance for studying the global and there's one aspect of what we have learned is that nested systems at multiple scales tend to be sustainable and ones that are operating entirely independently of either larger or smaller tend not to be. But it's also a global public bad and in terms of climate change and greenhouse gases, the problem of greenhouse gases, no one can be excluded from it and everyone does have a implicit negative incentive to do something about it. And what disturbs me is that people see that one of the impacts of our use of electricity and other things is global. Then that is perceived as the only and thus the only way of taking care of it is global and I will be arguing that global solutions are very important, but we're not moving and we've mismanaged, we've mis-conceptualized it so I want us to think about an alternative way. Okay, so I will be arguing that we do not need to wait. It looks to me like it could be another 10 years, maybe even more before we got some international agreements and I don't think we can afford to wait that long. And there are lots of debates on this issue and I happen to have some reasoned views but I'm not going to get into that today because I'm not concerned about the globe as a governance. I am very concerned about our shared plan and the problems that we all face with greenhouse gases going up and then we've got some really nasty problems on the policy side of how do we develop policies that don't reward those that were the most selfish in the earlier period including some of us and so there are efficiency questions, effectiveness, moral, all sorts of questions. So these are difficult and important debates and there are reasonable proponents on many sides and I think we have some reasoned capabilities of what we can do but I want us to move ahead. So I think that's my basic message. Okay, let's go. So debate, I debated in high school, I learned a heck of a lot from debate and it's important that we engage in good discourse about it but debate alone without coming up with some things that are feasible doesn't get us anywhere. And we do eventually need global action so please do not interpret that I'm saying it's useless at the global level. I'm just saying right now we're not moving so there are many other things we can be doing and just waiting makes it potentially much more difficult. So we're facing not only warming but very great variability in climate and upsets on a whole bunch of different scores. So then what I want to do is in order to move ahead we want to look at a variety of questions. The first question I'm going to raise is kind of a social scientist question. Is the conventional theory we use for collective action the best theory for analyzing the problem? And of course I've been attacking that theory for some time in terms of it's the underlying theory of Garrett Harden and Mansur Olson and many others and so my answer is obviously no but we have to think about this hard. As the conventional theory is interpreted none of us will stop emitting greenhouse gases and all of us need the government on top of us to stop it. And they accept the theories of Garrett Harden and Mansur Olson and there are some aspects of their theories that are correct. It's just their policy recommendations of where they carry it and frequently I'm wrong. And the idea that we must have global theories is eventually correct but that doesn't mean it's exclusively. So I'm going to be addressing a variety of questions. Besides the conventional theory, the one that is kind of the foundation for what I'm dealing with here is our global benefits, the only benefits generate. And I'm going to be making an argument that a lot of our daily actions generate greenhouse gases eventually that is a harm to the entire world but it's also a harm to many of us locally and we need to be thinking of it only. Right now we think of individual, hello. I think we need to be thinking of individual externalities at the individual level, at the family level, at the small community level, at the little bit larger level, at a regional level, at a national level and at an international level. That changes the way we analyze it and we can do a much more rigorous job of analyzing it. And I don't know how many times people said, oh, anything local, that doesn't mean bad. It doesn't have an impact on the entire globe. Well if the only thing you're trying to avoid are global externalities and you don't see the externalities at lower levels then indeed, forget it, but if there are externalities that can be avoided at multiple scales then taking action at multiple scales can have a big impact. So we can have still more questions. Are large-scale governments always better equipped? Are they the ones that will solve collective action universally above smaller scale? And another one that people, a lot of people, some of the colleagues here have been saying, oh, if we have too many units involved, isn't that chaotic and isn't it difficult? And yes, but if you don't have more than one and one doesn't do anything, it might be a lot better to have multiple. And then the last question is really the title of the talk, how might a polycentric system with various mechanisms at very small and moderate, somewhat bigger and bigger all the way to global, can it make a difference? And polycentricity is a concept that comes out of the work of Vincent Ostrom and Charles Thiebaud back in the 60s as they were looking at urban phenomena and arguing that in a metropolitan area there were not benefits that were strictly for the entire metropolitan area, which was the argument, in that there were polycentric systems that were very important. Okay, so now let's do a quick overview of collective action theory. And the presumption is that it does explain the use of activities which produce greenhouse gas and global externalities. And obviously reducing the use of cars and lowering furnace use, et cetera, can be potentially very costly and costly for the individual. And if there are no benefits for the individual and the only benefits are global, it really is a difficult. Because no one wants to be a sucker. And we have all sorts of reasons for assuming that people will not voluntarily act if it is only to solve a global problem. So the conventional view captures the nature of many problems. But it basically is saying, if we don't do anything and we don't ask the government to come in and solve it, nothing will happen and we are in bad shape. Now the support for this theory, empirically, has been pretty weak. And so what I have been doing since the 60s is addressing this one, a very wide diversity of fields, the first groundwater in California, then policing in terms of public goods around the U.S. and then irrigation systems in Nepal and a variety of others, and now very extensive work on forestry. And we are finding that when users see a future that they can affect and that they are more likely to be in that future that they can affect, then they are much more likely to take action. And in our forestry studies, we have studies now in over 100 forests around the world and good statistical analysis. And we find that when the users themselves monitor, that's when forest conditions get better. And that's not in our theory. There's no discussion as people talk about externalities that some of those are at a local level and local people are concerned about it and local people will, I mean, investing in monitoring. That's something that's not, I hope you all will go forth and recognize that in their papers in science and BNAS that show that very, very carefully. So we need to change the basic assumptions that we're using. And some of you may not be too happy about that. I don't want to change market theory when we're talking about market problems. There's no need to change it. To just apply economic theory as we've evolved it for the market, for commons, is not adequate. And we need to rely on a behavioral theory of human action. And one of the things that we have found in our research is that building trust, not trust, building trust is a very, very important thing that people do who can solve these problems. And then, as I mentioned, we need to be thinking about unnested externalities and not just one. So if we turn to the problem of a behavioral, this isn't behaving the best, a behavioral theory of human action, I draw heavily on the work of Herbert Simon and the basic idea that people want to be rational, want to obtain outcomes as best they can, but they frequently don't have complete information. They don't have a way of maximizing in terms of the situations. And they can learn norms and they can have preferences that involve payoffs for others. And so we need to be thinking of a broader theory of human behavior. And that's at the foundation of what we're working on. Then we need to be thinking about nested externalities. And so in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, besides what does go to the globe, when you take a bike out for a ride in the countryside instead of taking a car for a ride in the countryside, you are producing a lot less extra greenhouse gases and your health's better. So we haven't taken into account that biking and walking can produce benefits at the individual level and that there are externalities at the individual level of costs and health problems that you can avoid. When a neighbor, when a household community decides to invest in insulation, they are saving themselves money over a 10, 15 year period and the externalities of higher cost from heating their house are avoided. So we really need to be thinking of a variety of externalities at multiple levels. So if there are no changes are made, we'll have households that purchase X amount of carbon by either buying gas instead of bicycling or thermos or things of this sort. If there were appropriate incentives that were overt, they'd purchase less and if we can make them avert, that's part of the policy debate of how do we make them avert. And if they accept responsibility for eliminating costs to the family, they can reduce carbon by even more and this is what I'm hoping can be done. So let's talk about heating buildings. The building use is 40% of the primary energy in the US. 40%, I don't know how many of you have been in an office or the university where you come in and the heat was on all night and it's just, so what do you do? You open the windows. Well, the heat ran all night and there's a great waste for the university and some universities have started competition among the dorms, very interesting process where they have to get good recording mechanisms but get the dorms to compete of who can reduce their energy bill the most and they can, for the campus, by getting a little competition in there, they can reduce it quite a bit. We've just started it and we did it at IU. It's an amazing sort of thing. So there's a very important article in the Proceedings of National Academy of Science by DEETS at all and they could indicate that households could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% in 10 years. If they did a variety of things like weatherization and better insulation, low flow shower heads. Now this one, folks, the next time you get in the shower, if you have to go, oh my God, it's so hot and you have to turn the cold water way up, think about what that means. You brought the hot water to this very hot level. You pay for all of that and pushing greenhouse gases up and then you can't stand it. So get your hot water down here. You don't have to get it down to none but you can use less cold water. It does not affect the efficiency of your clothing washing and your dishwasher. And it's such a simple, simple thing. The efficient water heaters. So not only getting the water heater turned down but getting more efficient ones. Improved appliances. We just got a new dish washer, pardon me, a clothes washer, front loading. Very fast. Uses less water, uses less heat. I'm real pleased with it. Getting fuel efficient vehicles. There are now lots of ways of getting your thermostat at home or in your office so that when you're not there, it turns off. So you're not wasting 12 hours of heating or air conditioning. I mean, you think about it, it's just huge what we waste. So that PNAS article is very useful. Then our community efforts that can be done is to have community campaigns that address this. And I'm gonna talk about two, one done in Sacramento and one done at Berkeley. I was born in Rice, California. You don't have to part in some of my projects. The Sacramento Municipal Water Utility is a private utility. So they were very concerned about having to expand and build new plants and all the rest. And they started to take random samples of their users and then they would rank them. And then they'd send back information to the users. So the bill compared your household use with everyone else's in your neighborhood. And so the bill looked like that. And just giving people feedback information made a very big difference. They tried out something where they put a face on it. And when this was after this, but for those that were really good, they put a big smiley face. And for those that are bad, they put a lot of smiley face. And people who had a big family got a frown, they got furious. And so they didn't find any self-appearance, but they have kept adding the smile. And so they got a lot of change behavior. They tried a market system of trying to get people monetary rewards for reducing. Didn't work. This worked. And I'll go on to Berkeley first. This was a financing initiative where they wanted to finance people who would do renewable or solar. And they wanted to overcome the burden of doing it because I've just had solar on my garage and I can tell you it's a pretty big bill. But what they wanted was the citizens, okay, you go get an estimate from a reliable person. Bring it to us and we'll certify it. And then you can get a loan up to 20 years at a low interest. And that is then paying every year on your tax bill. How simple can you get? And so many people, they ran out of funds right away. They got it started, they ran out of funds, they got another one, they started. But if more locals will do that, it's one way of getting a lot of things done at a local level. Okay, well, we have another question because everyone's saying, well, this still doesn't do any good. You gotta go large scale. Well, does it always work at the large scale? Well, we have a lot of, there are policies at the large scale that do work. But it's pretty ambiguous. People point you to the Montreal Protocol and say, oh, we did it. Well, there were only five really big producers of far, far, far off, whatever that was. And one of them was Dupont. And they had already discovered an alternative that they really wanted to use. So the biggest manufacturer said, great, put a limit on it, we'll stop right away and we'll go in and make a lot of money because we have an alternative. So we can't just go to that. There were lots of other things about the Protocol Treaty, but it isn't an example of how to solve the kind of conflict situation that we now have. The Canadian Department of Fisheries, the East Coast of Canada, a local fisherman were saying, hey, there's a problem, there's overfishing, it's a problem, it's a problem, it's a problem, it's a problem. And the ministry said, oh, you don't have the data, we've got the statistical data and we know you don't, you're just dumb fisherman. And two years later it collapsed. So they didn't take the word of locals seriously and then they had a massive collapse. So that's a big problem. You go to EU, which is working on fisheries supposedly and that's not been successful. There are potential problems with multiple actors. You can have linkage between. And so some people are kind of concerned that some of the firms in Europe that are local and have adopted policies that come local now are buying their things from overseas where there's huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. And so you then buy it from there and have to do the shipping costs. So it isn't always the case if you don't move to a larger that you've solved it all. There are other problems. You can have inconsistent policies that you can have that make it much more difficult to find a way of solving these problems. You're going to inadequate certification. We've been looking at a lot of the certification under the Kyoto Treaty and some of it is just incredibly bad. Free writing. And so having multiple, there's no question, no problems. But right now no problems, we can't get anything big. So I'd say the problems that we're facing with multiple units are not as big as the problems we're facing of inactivity. And I think we can move ahead a lot, Paul is such a. So I think the lessons that we're slowly but surely learning, there are complexity of causes. There's not just one, it's not just a few large-scale industrial producers. We're all doing it. The knowledge of exact causes and effects is still developing. We've got a lot of scientific knowledge about the impact. I'm not challenging that but there's still a lot to solve about getting good, tough data about precise estimates. But we do know that with a number of the kinds of policies we might adopt, you could then find some opportunistic behavior that, but I don't know any policies that people have evolved and didn't dealt with that don't have the chance of opportunistic behavior. And I think that policies at any level can generate errors and we have to be aware of it. So as I indicated earlier, I do propose a concentric approach that goes back to early theoretical work in the 1960s in terms of urban problems. And Vincent Ostrom and Charlie Thiepel wrote a very important article in 61 arguing that instead of there being one kind of good and a metropolitan area even for policing or any of the wide diversity of things that governments do, there are multiple scales. We then did a series of studies from the 1970s on that were very, very rigorous. And we did find that metropolitan areas that had some large like crime lab and dispatching. And then small and medium sized police departments that had found ways of working together. This is where we found the most successful low crime or low cost so that it affects both efficiency and effectiveness. And so this is not just a theory. It is a theory that has been now tested with extensive data. And the arguments that people had, they were arguing that oh, you gotta consolidate all those departments because they can't possibly do crime lab. Well, when we went out and did empirical work we found out they weren't trying. They'd already figured out that it was better to contract with the local hospital or the state or somebody. So our academic knowledge was lousy. The forest conditions, we have a collaborative network, the international forestry resources and institutions network. We have centers in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and we are doing some work in the US at Michigan and at IU. And we go in and we literally, we had ecologists help us with teaching us how to measure trees and getting very good ecological measures. And we are doing that. And then besides doing all the information about the tree growth and diversity and all the rest, we spend a lot of time with local communities finding out what are their traditions? How do they make decisions? What kind of rules, how broad gender representation are why diversity of things? And what we found in a statistical analysis because now we have a large N. If we look at the impact of private forest, government forest or community forest, just use those three broad terms. There's no statistical difference over a large number of forests. So people think I am recommending that community is always better. No, but what we're finding is that it's not the formal rules, but what they're doing locally, how much trust they have in one another, how much sense. So some government forests, people have a limited right to harvest. And with a limited right to harvest, non-timber forest products and mushrooms and important things, so fodder for animals, all sorts of things, they have a long run future. And with a long run future, they tend to monitor and be more active and the forest condition is better. And so it's not just turning it over to the government or to a community, that makes a difference. It's getting complex arrangements that involve people really investing in themselves. So what we basically have in much of what we study is that instead of one global response or large scale, we need to apply, polycentric theory, to develop complex, multi-level political, economic, social systems and recognize that sometimes the ones we design in the first place aren't gonna work very well and we're gonna have to go back and learn and redo, et cetera, that it has to be interactive. And we need to gain more sophistication on the institutional side. Our ecologist colleagues have a lot of sophisticated knowledge about nested systems. And we don't, we treat things as the government or the market, even though the market may have 500 participants in it, or even more. And so we just need to be thinking of much more than one remedy. And my other argument will be that no matter what we do, we need to be sure that locals are more involved. Policies that are made in some national capital by a bingo meeting with a international or national government, and drawing a map. A lot of international policies are the equivalent. They spend an hour to draw a map and then they tell everybody, this is our decision and they expect everyone to honor it. And they've never even looked at some of the areas. I've been in a forest in Nepal that were nationalized earlier after people had been 500 years of banning themselves. It was just yanked away from them because after all, they couldn't, they were just peasants. Anyway, I will open it for questions or discussion or however you guys want to run out. Please. Yes. Hi. I'm really good. We've sort of lined out the use of government and the use of support. Well, basically, we're talking about the center of government, we've got a very, very, you know, local government and state government nationalized. I was wondering what you thought of, I don't think he's done it like he's seen, but how helpful is our base solution that we're working towards using local carbon emissions, local warming, specifically a lot of companies are cutting out the way their products are. I don't think there's any use, the point of local carbon emissions that are carbon neutral products that are selling before consumers are wrong. Yeah, I'm being advertising. Being advertising, and sometimes it's real. Sometimes it isn't. That's part of our problem with a lot of health products that sometimes it is just on the label and it's not real. But sometimes it is real and the more we get people instructed to be paying attention to the way that people present it, it's important. So that would be one of the sorts of actions that fits in a polycentric theory. But I don't rely on that only. Well, in regards to today's talk, it seems to me that what we have today is a polycentric system. We have initiatives going at all scales from the individual to the college campus, to cities, to states, to regional buildings, like in England, some national governments moving ahead, loopings of national governments, like if you're really new to the tapestry program. So we have this policy. We have the beginning, but a lot of people have said, oh, there's uses. And the renewable energy installations are growing rapidly, energy efficiency is improving, and at the same time, emissions increase both in the United States and both in the future. Here, that trajectory, the energy administration has predicted that with current policies in place, emissions will be 35% high in 20 years. Compared to that, with the scale that we've got, the need for full concentration is anything, for example, in the state of London. And it seems to me that it's just too optimistic to say, well, we can manage, in any sense, at least kind of decentralize. I'm saying that it's better than waiting 10 years before we get some of that international action. No, it's waiting. All of these things are going on. What do you mean, nobody's waiting? Have we had any agreement? What did we do in Copenhagen? We've always said to the system, people are doing exactly the kinds of things that we just talked about, they're all scared. But not enough, and we're not teaching. So we teach that, we say, oh, that's just stupid because it's not making any difference. In this country, about almost half the people do not accept the proposition that the climate can be due to human action. You're about a problem, my theory of that, Mr. The two leading candidates for the growth in our nation also do not accept. It's tragic. Yes, but I'm saying right now, we're not getting any of that up there, and it is encouraging that there is a lot more going on at local levels. I'm not saying that that is going to be sufficient for the long run, but my proposal is, let's do everything we can to improve that. And I'm still pushing for large-scale solutions as part of that. I'm not ignoring it, let's not sit around. I consider a lot of the current policy debate is twiddling our thumbs, and I just don't think that's a reasonable way. I see it as a real threat. So then, the more we can do, and the more we can get neighborhoods to take action, the more we can get things like Reggie in the far west, far east, in terms of some of the market arrangements and the tax arrangements. And some of the European, not only you have the EU, but some of the large cities in Europe have really taken very major actions. We need more of that. So I think we have more chance of getting more of that than we have of getting better treaties. If I thought that we could get better treaties if we just organized a little better, I'd go for treaties. And then also, because as soon as you have the treaties, you've got to figure out how to do the local and all to fit the treaty. So the treaty gets an agreement, but how do you keep the agreement if you don't have various other policies at other levels? So it's just that I don't like to see us wasting time and energy saying, denying that there's a lot more we can do. I'm an activist. Let's go. But will monitoring happen in the absence of ownership, or is it pretty much ownership has to happen than the local community is willing to monitor them? Well, see, monitor can be a little thing on your utility bill. And that was not that expensive to do. And they did affect use. And on the campuses where they've had the competition among dorms, they've gotten a power use down 10%, 15% on a dorm. And one of the things they're finding is that we are indicating those heating things over there by your head, you know? That's very uninformative. It does your current temperature and you can play with it, but it doesn't turn off when the room is empty. It keeps going at the same level, day and night. And in the dorms where they change the meters so that people got better information and they could adjust it, then they know even more reduction. I was asking a reference to your force monitoring. I know that community conservation has less developed parts of the world. Oftentimes, a local community won't take care of the resources unless they have a stake in their ownership. The stake is different than ownership. And that's what we were surprised. We expected to show community forest to be better. And we were wrong. It isn't simple ownership. It is stake. But stake, there are many ways of having stake. And are you allowed to walk through? Can you pick wildflowers? Can you pick various kinds of mushrooms and things like that? That's not harming the forest capacity of regrowl, but you've got an interest. And so without a stake, yes. Why should you put in effort when they've taken it away from you? For many people, at least they've lived there. They're forbearers. They've been there for hundreds of years. And then the government comes along and says, it is, you don't know how to keep it. I mean, the insulting aspects of what we've done into indigenous communities around the world is pretty frightening. I don't want to change market organization in those areas where there are private goods with few extra downs. So capitalism is one of those terms that is frequently used, it's very rare. And if you're talking about the use of market organization for products that have very few externals, I don't know anything about it, but it's the difference between then idealizing and putting up as heroes people who make billions of money. That's not market theory. That's part of our social theory. And our social theory has led us to confuse making money with being great. And I admire successful entrepreneurs, but I don't idolize them. And I think getting people to move away from idolizing political leaders and entrepreneurs who made lots of money would be important, and that's what you're getting at. But capitalism is too broad a term. Jerry, counterpart market system with government. Well. And then argue we need something polycentric. But what is a market system with proper crisis be a polycentric system that would move the profit mode under the strength of the crisis, people would save energy, that's what's needed to find the most efficient way to do it. Why don't we just fix the price system and forget about everything else? Because we've been proposing this and there's no action at all. And so I'm tired of waiting. I do think that besides just pricing, that there are other things we can be doing so that my model of the individual, my theory of individual is a little broader than a narrow rational choice out of this narrowest. But there are, I'm for a lot of capital trade possibilities, but nothing's happening. So my discouragement is with inactivity. And I don't see any move. I think we could be still debating on that in 10 years. 15 years. And we continue the level of greenhouse gas emissions for another 15 years. So I'm very concerned. And whenever we can use various kinds of market mechanisms and governments get incentive systems that are real and encourage firms to take very positive action, great, that's part of what I would see. Are you doing something you're not doing stupid, like buying your third LCDTT, putting a 3,000 foot extension on their house? What does government do? Which government do you think is stupid? Well, the stupid decisions that government are not limited to just local. So part of our problem is that we turn and idealize systems as if governments always search out the best interest of their citizens. And our research shows they don't always, some do at some times. But you've got to get into how are we choosing officials, we've evolved a system in the U.S. that is involving an awful lot more funds going from various kinds of private firms to government officials. Then we had 35, 40, 50 years ago. And I think we can do an analysis that there are many aspects of that that are pretty dysfunctional. So my puzzle is that anyone, I've seen local governments that are corrupt and there are local leaders who just do very well. And I've seen that all the way up. But you have a little more chance of learning about things. At, well, and you can learn about them at all levels. Partly, if you don't teach, you look at the textbooks in government now, there are not very many discussions about some of the incentives for malpractice. And that should be a part of how we teach. Just like we should teach, I mean, we do teach monopoly in economics and the bad aspects of monopoly. But we are not teaching some of the bad aspects of government, as we should. And we don't teach local government hardly at all. Used to be that every freshman who took a introduction to political science is one semester of government, national, and one state local, state and local security. I'm very impressed about that. We're going to be an active man who, or more necessarily, is of communication regardless of resource to extract and complete. How do you reconcile the sustained impact as you mentioned in our lecture with the existence of strip lining, there's a lobbying impact on that. If we look out there, we'll find some groups that are doing all sorts of positive things for the environment and others that are doing all sorts of negative. And, but we are then waiting for the top down to put taxes on and change the behavior of people motivated by profit motive to do things that harm the environment. And I'd like to get taxes on them. I'm not opposed to it. To some extent, we're starting to do a little bit more at the state level. And I'm very encouraged with that. But if that's what we wait for, I just don't want us waiting. I want us to recognize it. Let's get in there and do things at various scales and really try to make a difference. And then we can learn from that and how some of those are going to be terrible failures. Well, let's learn from failures and move ahead. So, how do you make a lot of improvement happen? Well, one of the things would do, have more people read the Leeds at all article on PNAS. I mean, that is one of the leading scientific journals and very well. There's a new one coming out in PNAS about next week that is on some of these same issues. And it's good. And then, like the sorts of things that people were studying in the college efforts, there have been some very careful studies. Some of it's just averageizing in college, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but some of it's been carefully studied. And there is good scientific information. What happens when people have better dialysis and things of information? So, having all the scientific knowledge that you might need to think through ice melt, that isn't needed for a lot of what I'm talking about. I was very important. I'm gonna be doing a major study of ice melt in Kenya in the Rockies on water systems and irrigation systems. But I don't expect that's going to be impacting a lot of private decisions about their use of electricity. But I'm very interested in the way and that institutional arrangements at a local level react to the threat. And there's a very substantial threat of ice melt and producing the amount of water that they have in the future. The consumption of the ice melt is about several percent of what we're talking about. How do we persuade the same energy without thinking about the loss in general? Pay that, how do we make it sexy? Yeah, it's tough. I don't think there's a simple way, but the more people in freshman classes really get into some of these issues, the more we work with community groups and we try to provide them the information and the things that they could be doing in their community, we can slowly but surely make a difference. But no, we have an awful lot of the individual level decisions that are not in the long-term self-interest of the individuals who make them. Even if economic output becomes more efficient with respect to the amount of the greenhouse gases that are produced, we're thinking about we need to live under an economic system that has a growth imperative. There's a lot of evidence that in the high-income developed countries of America, of Europe and so forth, that the last several decades of growing economic output is not obvious, it's led to any increase in human welfare. We have a win, the economy doesn't grow as far as there's always problems rising on the climate, residents and prime ministers who are voted out of office. So how do you think it's possible to really solve this trajectory towards global climate change that will be disastrous for civilization as long as we have an economic system that seems to have endless economic growth from here to eternity built into it in a way that works? Do you teach economics? Yes, I do. What, do you teach that? Sometimes I do, but I don't guess. Well, I think it's important and I don't think we should stop teaching market theory, but regardless, profits are one criteria that we use for evaluation, but in a world of complex equity issues and ecological environmental, we may want to be moving much more sensitively to a more complex picture of what is success and we need to be doing that our teaching. So we have a whole new generation who are studying with us and let's not continue these things and then writing for the press and introduce and things of that sort. It's important that we stress the challenges of changing our systems to make them more sustainable and instead of economic growth, sustainability is a much more important value and we need to stress that, we're not. So a lot of it is at our feet as college teachers and what we profess. Whatever, you know, you are, we're I guess at the time, so why don't you? Well, you slowly but surely take where is there action? What legislators can you elect that I have more likelihood to put taxes and other things on various kinds of firms? How do you get the press to cover the costs more effectively? There's no single thing and there's no magic. Organizing and getting word out there and getting away from the sense that, oh, if it's a private firm, they can do anything if as long as they're making profits. Well, I studied a problem back in the 60s that looked like it was going to disaster and it took a while, but that basin is, that groundwater basin is now 50 years later in much better condition than it was earlier. So I guess partly I do have a sense that we can take difficult and costly steps and see 50 years later, it is better. Right now, I'm afraid that 50 years from now we've got a disaster. I can't hear you. Well, that's one of the techniques. Again, I don't think there's any one, but that's one technique that we have available to us that we can be thinking about. And here is where for us, this is where for us are very important in that the good forest land is at just sequester a lot more carbon than urban areas. It's not a panacea by itself, but it's something we should be thinking about and encouraging ways of, again, trying to encourage people who invest in their forest. I'm not very encouraged with REDD reduced emissions and deforestation and degradation because they're talking about huge sums of money and not very much on how to set this up institutionally so that they actually get a long-term reduction in emissions and more carbon stored. It's big, it's big advertising right now. And I've looked at some of the policy papers in this area and they're not very sophisticated. It's, again, advertising. Okay, well, that's for sure. We're closing the comment here. We do short-term aspirations and some short-term aspirations, but we don't address long-term problems. And it seems to me that the early merchant, our normal historian, talks about the transformation of consciousness. And she said, this is the only time of that when people have to face up with contradictions in their lives. And we see this with urban control and other issues. When the government regulations, have you looked at the literature of how these contradictions how these contradictions arise so that they become a public debate? Well, more on the resource use in the looking at indigenous communities what they've done in recognizing, and at least what I've tried to do is make it apparent to many people that indigenous communities that managed resources for centuries were not that dumb. And we've done grave time by taking all their rights away from them and what we've replaced it with is not very adequate. But that's where I've done most of my work on that score. Well, thank you very much. Before we go on to the next question, we were just a message to the examiner in the Department of Economics, Professor Ashram. This is a- Yes, room. Okay. So thank you very much for joining us. And before-