 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 Bettke, 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 what does self-governance have to do with water rights? So two things about that. They wanted to pick a problem that seemed to not be easily solved by market mechanisms alone. So standard economic theory had pointed out that these things are what might call public goods, and they had certain serious problems associated with market-driven solutions for that alone. And yet, like a lot of history had happened where people had managed their water rights and they had done things without necessarily central control by government. And so how is it that communities have, in fact, solved their collective action problems in the past, and that became a big, big theme. So they started by picking examples of where it appeared that economic theory strictly understood would have to remain silent about how maybe a market mechanism or how voluntary mechanisms could solve the collective action problem. And then they demonstrated how communities, in fact, find rules so they can live better together while solving these collective action problems. And water rights is a very stark one. But to a lot of people on the outside, they think of Lynn and they think of collective action problems, commons problems, common pool resource problems. And then they see Vincent doing federalism and constitutions, and they think of him as separate projects. But really they're not. They're one and the same. So part of the reason why Vincent believed in the nature of the compound republic and what the political theory of that was is this sort of Tocquevillian idea of a self-governing society, decentralized society, a society of free and responsible individuals, and understanding that the strict dichotomizations that exist in the social sciences don't aid us in thinking through those issues. So it's a fascinating kind of research program historically and contemporaneously or whatever. And that's one of the things that's striking about both Vincent and Lynn is that their work while governed by a very theory was always grounded with their feet on the ground with real world problems. So they took as their, so they, you know, again, think about that political workshop in political theory and policy analysis. So they were always stuck to the ground to do theorizing rather than having their theorizing be free floating and sort of abstract. So they're in a lot of ways different than John Rawls, for example, when they go to sort of find how are the rules evolved that we can live better together and realize the gains from social cooperation or another way to put that is how to realize the gains from productive specialization and peaceful social cooperation. They were trying to figure out the framework within which that takes place. One of the workshops early projects involved Eleanor and a lot of the people that she worked with actually riding around in police cars to understand better what was happening with the provision of police services in the local community. And you brought up this issue of them wanting to have their feet on the ground. So you see that manifesting right away in the research. And I know that's something that you've picked up on as well. So you've incorporated field work into what you do in a variety of ways and you've emphasized its importance as a method in the social sciences. Can you talk a little bit about how you've used that in your work, why you think it's important? Yeah, well, there's a great paper by these people Lemke and Pallagosvili and Becky on Lynn and her work on that. So, yeah, so everyone should read it. No, so my involvement with field work and also with the Ostroms, because they're actually contemporaneously, they happened at the same time, has to do with my study of the Soviet system. So when I started studying the Soviet economy in the mid-80s, it was fracturing but it still existed. So when I started graduate school Gorbachev wasn't yet in power. But when I finished graduate school Gorbachev was in power and he was in the midst of doing what became known as his Glasnost, which meant public frankness or public truthness. And then Perestroika, which is restructuring of the economic system. And so that happened at the end. But when I started studying the Soviet Union, I started studying its history and its practice and the real question there was there was this big disjoint between the way the system was supposed to work in theory and the way that operated in practice. And this was one of the real great strengths of what Lynn was doing with her work on Common Pool Resources is studying the disjoint between the rules in form and the rules in use. So the rules in form might not look like they can solve like the collective action problem. But the rules in use actually find ways to work around the difficulties and come to a solution. Now, I should point out that in Lynn's work, what she believed that you should do is what's called multiple methods methodology. And so one of her really strong essays in this is an essay in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which is her studying forestry patterns. And so she, I'm not gonna remember the exact title, but basically the approach was she relied on satellite imagery. She relied on field work. And then she also did computer simulations, and so it was like this in the lab, in the field from the sky kind of idea. And her idea was that each of us as social scientists must become a specialist in one of these kind of methodologies. And then what we should do is realize gains from trade with other social sciences. So she was a collaborative researcher. So if you look at her research, she has lots of co-authorships and lots of projects that she led with different people. And she was always doing that kind of work. And that's because she was always looking for these gains from trade. They did that a lot with the workshop in Indiana where they constantly had visitors over and in new blood constantly. One of the really great things about the workshop is that the university buildings, they actually have like a house for the people that come and visit and they're right there. And so it's a really, she built that community up, her and Vincent, and it's just an amazing shop. And so I think this multiple methods methodology thing is really strong. And the problem is that the least respected of those is field work. And that's what needs to be always the grounding. Because if you want to understand this issue of the de facto rules or the rules in use, you only have access to that if you go into the field and you ask people how they are solving their problems and you pay respect. So one way to think about Eleanor's work as well is that she had tremendous faith in the power of the local people to solve problems themselves, rather than have a one size fits all problem from a bureaucracy coming down, whether or not it's in a municipality or whether or not it's in a federal government or whether or not it's in an international agency. It's in the power of the people to solve their problems themselves, that we see the emergence of self governing societies, which is what she was trying to understand and to appreciate as the nature of sort of what a true democratic system is.