Institutional alternatives
Content for week of Monday, July 20, 2020–Friday, July 24, 2020
Readings
- Tim Harford, “Do you believe in sharing?,” Financial Times, August 30, 2013
- Chapters 1 and 2 in Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action1
- This one is super long and game theoretical. You can skim through lots of it (especially the mathy sections). But it’s also pretty foundational to public administration, so it is important. Make sure you get the gist of what’s happening, but please don’t strain yourself with all the tiny details. Remember your grad school reading skills—read the introduction and conclusion, look around in the middle for things that look interesting, and make sure you understand the gist of what’s going on.
- Aaron Vansintjan, “What Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom’s early work tells us about defunding the police”
- Abigail York’s Twitter thread on Ostrom’s work on policing and local government (Ostrom went by “Lin,” so don’t get confused when Dr. York calls her that in the thread)
- Melanee Thomas and Lisa Lambert, “A COVID-19 smackdown: why rule breakers need to be punished,” CBC News, April 18, 2020
Optional viewing but highly recommended
- WTIU Documentaries/PBS, “Actual World, Possible Future”
Videos
Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.
- Introduction
- Tragedies and CPRs
- Private solutions to CPR problems
- Government solutions to CPR problems
- Informal solutions to CPR problems
You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:
Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).↩︎