A great choice by the Nobel Committee

Charitably, giving the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama for the reasons it was given was naively aspirational and politically stupid. But the Nobel Committee redeemed itself a teeny tiny bit today (though I imagine it’s a different Nobel Committee) by giving the economics prize to one of my intellectual and academic heroes, Elinor Ostrom.

Ostrom, a political science professor at Indiana University, is the author of Governing the Commons, a book I first read in college, and then re-read a few years ago. Her work was the first to encourage me to think deeply about what the “commons problem” nature of climate change means for the parameters of the problem and the hope of solving it. It is still the book that influences me most when I think about a bit of climate policy and ask the question “Is this going to help? Is this going to work?”

Of note, Ostrom is also the first woman to win the economics prize, and the fifth woman to win a Nobel this year, which is a record for a single year. So congratulations to Elinor Ostrom, who bent the arc of history a bit today, and whose life’s work may yet bend it quite a bit more.