Your weekly Occupy the Econ Dept reading

[Peter McDonald]

Hello fellow conspirators of love,

I'm going to be sending out weekly Occupy the Econ Dept readings over the summer. The first comes from Elinor Ostrom, who recently died. In 2009, she won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (fun fact, the Nobel Prize in Economics is not actually a Nobel Prize), for her work which was dedicated to debunking and finding counterexamples of the Tragedy of the Commons, which is still taught in econ today I believe. The Tragedy of the Commons is a libertarian/objectivists' favorite argument for the necessity of private property rights, as you may well know. Anyway, here is her (not actually a) Nobel Prize lecture. It's long (but pretty easy to read), and I haven't read all of it, but I will by the time I send out the next reading. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2009/ostrom_lecture.pdf

Like Cory Booker said, we are faced with one choice in life over and over. We can either leave things as they are or take the responsibility for changing them.

Peace, Love, and Liberation

-SG