Ostrom

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, as distilled in popular culture, holds that individual humans are brutally selfish as they struggle to triumph in a nasty world of scarcity and competition. Life is supposedly an epic "survival of the fittest," an idea ratified by the premises of conventional economics and its notion of homo economicus and scientist Richard Dawkins' famous theory of the "selfish gene."

But many scientists are rewriting this story based on their own empirical studies of life, which reveal the powerful role of cooperation in evolution. David Sloan Wilson, the renowned evolutionary biologist and scholar of cooperation, is a prominent proponent of "mullti-level selection," the idea that natural selection doesn't occur only at the level of genes and individuals, but among groups and even ecosystems. 

Evolution is not just a matter of competition among individual organisms, he and other scientists argue. It's also about cooperation within groups and how groups of cooperators enjoy evolutionary advantages over groups consumed by internal competition. 

"A group of cooperators can robustly out-compete a group whose members cannot cohere," said Wilson. In a famous essay co-authored with biologist E.O. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson offers a concise summary of this idea: "Selfishness beats altruism within groups.  Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary." 

In my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #32), I explore with David Sloan Wilson some of the insights that evolutionary science reveal about cooperation and other prosocial behaviors.  

The economist Paul Samuelson once wrote, “I don't care who writes a nation's laws—or crafts its advanced treaties—if I can write its economics textbooks.” 

What a pleasure to learn that an insurgent team of economists, The Core Project, is about to rewrite the nation’s laws.  The new introductory economics textbook is called The Economy.  It is surely the most daring, cosmopolitan and empirically driven textbook since Samuelson’s tome was unleashed on undergraduates in 1948.  It is also packed with innovations worthy of our digital age. The Core Project’s sardonic tagline says it well:  “Teaching economics as if the last three decades had happened.” 

This is not your grandfather’s econ textbook.  Nor is it an exercise in ideological spin or neoliberal bashing. In both style and substance, Core-Econ (the name for the Core Project's website) shakes off the dreary norms of conventional economics and embraces the critical intelligence of the real world. 

Savor the delicious paradox that The Economy is published as an interactive ebook available for free downloads (pdfs) and printing. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivatives license, demonstrating that a free lunch is entirely feasible (at least for non-rival goods like books).

So far, ten of the twenty-one planned teaching modules have been published online; the remaining ten modules are expected to be completed by the end of 2014. At the moment, the online version is available as a “beta” release, which means that anyone can submit feedback and suggestions to improve the text before its release.

For many people, the commons exists as some sort of Platonic ideal -- a fixed, universal archetype.  That’s silly, of course, because commons are so embedded in a given place and moment of history and culture, and therefore highly variable.  Derek Wall takes this as a point of departure in his new book, The Commons in History:  Culture, Conflict and Ecology (MIT Press).  At 136 pages of text, it is a short and highly readable book, but one that conveys much of the texture of commons and enclosures as paradigms -- and the implications for ecosystems.

Wall is an economist at Goldsmith College, University of London, so he knows a few things about the biases of conventional economics.  He is also a member of the Green party of England and Wales, and therefore knows a few things about corporate power and oppositional politics. 

As the author of a recent intellectual biography, The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom (Routledge), Wall has a subtle mastery of Ostrom’s approach to the commons, but he is not afraid to wade into the political aspects of commons.  He notes, for example, “most commons have not been found to succeed or fail on the basis of their own merits.  Instead, they have been enclosed, and access has been restricted and often turned over to purely private ownership or state control.”  He adds that “commons is a concept that is both contests and innately political in nature.  Power and access to resources remain essential areas for debate.”

It is entirely appropriate, then, that Wall goes beyond the familiar Hardin-Ostrom debate on the rationality and economic value of commons, to explore what he calls “the radical case for the commons,” as outlined by E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill, among others.  While Marxist criticisms of the environmental effects of capitalism so often hit the mark, Wall points out that “the commons is not utopia.  A common-pool property rights do not guarantee a free and equal society.”  

That’s partly because a commons is not a unitary model, but only a template with highly variable outcomes.  People may have common rights to use “usufruct rights” on privately owned land, for example, authorizing them to gather fallen wood.  This can be considered a type of commons, albeit not one as self-sovereign and robust as those with communally owned and controlled land.  Commons may also coexist with hierarchical power relationships – a reality that also militates against a radical equality.

For newcomers to the commons wishing to acquaint themselves with Elinor Ostrom’s work, it can be a hard slog.  Her scholarly treatises, while often quite insightful, can be quite dense in delivering their hard research results and refined insights.  It is a real pleasure, therefore, to greet Sustaining the Commons, a new undergraduate textbook that has just been published.  The book provides a general overview of the intellectual framework, concepts and applications of Ostrom’s research on the commons. 

Best of all, in a refreshing departure from most academic publishing, the authors of the 168-page book decided to make it available for free as a downloadable pdf file.  Just go to the book’s website and blog, http://sustainingthecommons.asu.edu.

Sustaining the Commons is by John M. Anderies and Marco A. Janssen, both associate professors at Arizona State University and directors of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity, which is the publisher of the textbook.  Both authors worked with Ostrom from 2000 until her death in 2012.  Although Ostrom’s name is mostly associated with Indiana University, where she co-founded and ran the Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Ostrom was also a part-time research professor at ASU from 2006-2012.

Anderies and Janssen taught a course at ASU on Ostrom’s work, with a special focus on her books Governing the Commons (1990) and Understanding Institutional Diversity (2005).  Out of that teaching arose the idea for this book.  Ostrom herself saw and approved of the first draft of the book in April 2012, shortly before her death. 

The book is a lucid, logically presented introduction to the key concepts of Ostrom’s research.  There are chapters on “defining institutions,” “action arenas and action situations,” and “social dilemmas.”  There are also a series of case studies on the management of various types of common-pool resources – water, forests, domesticated animals – and a review of “design principles to sustain the commons.”  

There are a number of chapters on human behavior as it is studied by social science.  How do people make decisions about collective matters and how do they develop trust?  How are these behaviors studied in the laboratory?  What sorts of rules and social norms matter? 

One of the great achievements of the late Professor Elinor Ostrom was the identification of key design principles for successful commons.  She set forth eight of them in her landmark 1990 book, Governing the Commons.  The wording of those principles is aimed at social scientists who study the management of common-pool resources from a neutral, non-participatory, scientific perspective.  As a result, the principles are not as accessible to the general public, nor do they reflect the direct experiences and first-person voice of commoners.    

The first German Sommerschool on the Commons, which took place in Bechstedt/Thuringia in June 2012, decided to remedy this problem.  Participants took part in intense debates over what a new set of principles for commoning – based on the Ostrom principles – might look like if they reflected the personal perspective of commoners themselves.  The result is a statement, "Eight Points of Reference for Commoning,” which can be seen as a re-interpretation – remix? – of Ostrom's design principles.  

As Silke Helfrich notes on her Commonsblog, the Eight Points of Reference for Commoning “are based on the belief, that commons can flourish in very different contexts.”  The German version can be found here.  An English translation is below.  The German commoners consider the current wording of both the German and English versions as relatively stable, but they invite comments and suggestions for further changes.