 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 F.A. 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. So thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today, Pete. It's wonderful to be here with you, Jamie. One of the things that I find so impressive about Eleanor and Vincent and all of their colleagues at the workshop is there's just this incredible degree of consistency over 80, over 80 years that they're working together on these questions. They're starting with Tocqueville and these questions about self-governance and how it is people come together to solve problems on their own recognizing that even local governments don't just come out of nowhere. They're created by people at some point for some purpose and they're trying to understand how this process works and it just drives every single question and even the fact that they're starting with the question and moving from there to the method which lets them use this multiple methods approach that is so productive. Not all political science, not all economics and social sciences like this where it has this question-driven consistency. So what do you think is missing from people who fail to, not missing from the people, but missing from their answers when they fail to recognize the importance and they fail to recognize the importance of this approach? Well I think there's a couple of things. One of the first things is just a sheer methodological missing box. So the way in which the social sciences in the post-World War II error has been done is that you can think of it as dividing the following sense, thin theory or thick theory. And you can think about empirics as either being clean empirics or dirty empirics. So if I have a thin theory that means I have a notion of rational agents which sort of like the way economists think about things. If I have a thick theory it's like lots and lots of parts on the explanatory part. And you think about that, that's kind of sort of anthropology or whatever, a very thick description versus thin description. And of course in our world we have this divide here because if we're all in this thin model then there's no real reason for us to ever leave anything but our computers because we're all the same. Whether or not we're in sub-Saharan Africa or whether or not we're in Hawaii, basically man is the same across these different regions. And so why are we studying anything different? They're just going to be these rational agents imbued with various cognitive capacities and blah, blah, blah. On the other hand if I'm really thick description every universe, every island is its own universe. So I study the Balinese and Cockfight in depth and detail for this particular time and this particular place and that's all I can know, right? There's nothing to translate. So here's the dilemma. If we're all the same then there's no unique differences that we could glean from history, travel, whatever. On the other hand if we're all so different we're completely alien so we couldn't understand one another either. If I met a person from sub-Saharan Africa I wouldn't even understand who they were because I just have my own universe. They have their own language game. But somewhere social explanation exists somewhere in between those two, alright? So how do we think about this? So we most often think that it's a choice between either sound hardcore economics or soft fuzzy anthropology history or something, right? What about this other box? This other box where you have a thin theory which enables us to see universality across the cases but you fill in the cases with all of the unique institutional details that are involved. And that's how you get comparative political economy. And that's what the Ostroms were champions of. And that's why when you look at like her book, Governing the Commons, it had such a big impact because what she showed was not only across countries but also over time. So she has practices from Japan to Switzerland, right? And in all these different areas about how they dealt with their common pool resource problems. Lobster pots, you know, all these different examples. But also how they existed over time. So we have certain principles that she wants to draw out the thin theory of the long and enduring practices that allow for social cooperation to take place. So she paid attention to the details yet drew the general lessons. And that's a form of social science which I think we should be champion and getting on board on. Because I think that's also, you know, when public choice is in its best, it's sort of recognizing the comparative institutions. When Austrian economics is in its best, it's recognizing contextual nature of knowledge, yet the universal idea of an individual purposiveness and whatnot. And so I think there's this, we'll talk about this more, but I think there's this conflation of these programs. But Eleanor really highlights this comparative political economy perspective. And then she does it in a way which highlights the self-governing capacity of individuals. And so one of the real theoretical innovations of the Ostroms was this notion of co-production. It's a very, very simple idea when all of us who are teachers recognize this. But when you're actually having a really vibrant conversation, it's a giver and a receiver, and actually the giver of the knowledge oftentimes becomes the receiver. And that's what she talks about in co-production. Well, that's true not only for the classroom, but in terms of things like public safety. The other idea that I think besides co-production that's fundamental to, you know, Lynn's work is, again, it has to do with what are these self-governing capacities of the citizenry. And that we are, that democracies are fragile, that there are these fragile beasts that can break down for a variety of reasons. And that part of what you're trying to do is recognize what are the, what are and cultivate in citizens, going back to the workshop idea, cultivate in citizen scholars the capacities that are required for people to live in truly self-governing orders. I mean, it's a fascinating research program. It's this disjoint between the desjure and the de facto is, you know, fundamental to the way we understand it. We want to understand how people really behave, not the way that they sort of pretend to behave or people pretend that they behave theoretically. We want to understand, we want to use the methods that are appropriate for the questions we're asking. I mean, this is a multiple method, methodology, multiple methods methodology. It goes all the way back to Aristotle. It's simply, you know, Aristotle said you should choose the methods that are appropriate for the questions you want to ask. How we ever thought that there was this one size fits all approach to social science and what that does, it's in methodological straight jacket. And today, you know, when I was a kid, the straight jacket was different than the straight jacket today. Straight jacket today is like, you know, big data. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be paying attention to big data or utilizing that information when it comes about. But the idea that it's a be all and end all and that's all we should be focusing on. No, you know, what we need to be doing is we need to actually have respect for multiple forms of evidence and then triangulate various different problems and then try to hone in on, you know, solving the issue. So all of us need to like, you know, take a big deep breath and recognize that no one has a red phone to God. You know, I have the truth and, you know, clothing like that. And so we need to like borrow and learn and continue to learn from each other. And that's kind of another Ostrom big point, which is lifelong learning. You know, you mentioned about the longevity of the research program. One of the things that's most fascinating about that is she was constantly learning. You know, she unfortunately passed away at 78 years old. Vincent was in his 90s. But she, you know, got pancreatic cancer and died fairly quickly. But at the time when she died, when she was first diagnosed, she was trying to work out a center in human evolution down at Arizona State. She's doing her work at University of Indiana. She's working with us in collaboration here, which is more theoretical, you know, conceptual. So more conceptual, more, you know, field and empirical and then more computer simulation. She was learning constantly.