By editor
Originally published on Wed June 13, 2012 8:08 am
Elinor Ostrom, the only woman ever to win an economics Nobel, died today at age 78.
She was famous for challenging an idea known as the tragedy of the commons — the theory that, in the absence of government intervention, people will inevitably overuse a shared resource.
So, for example, if a village shares a pasture, it's in the individual interest of each farmer to graze his cattle as much as possible on the pasture even though, in the long run, overgrazing may ruin the pasture for everyone.
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