"This month's most surprising Nobel Prize winner was not Barack Obama but Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist from the University of Indiana who picked up the coveted Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science.
Jamie Bartlett is head of the independence programme at the think tank Demos. Not only is Ostrom the first female recipient, she is also not an economist...
...Ostrom has been entirely devoted to understanding one thing: managing what are known as common pool resources. Common pool resources are resources that are ‘non-excludable' (it is impossible to prevent individuals from using them) and "rival" (use by one individual means that there is less available for next). In other words, no one really owns them, and we can all use them to destruction. Farming on a public field or fishing in common waters are the classic examples. The problem is this that is in everyone's interests to limit usage to ensure there are enough cod in the North Sea for the stock to replenish. But, left to our own devices, we will all over fish and exhaust these finite resources, and all be worse off for it..."
The rest is at: Common sense Nobel | open Democracy News Analysis
A related appeal by revisioning academics for biophysical economics is here - Does Economics Violate the Laws of Physics?: Scientific American
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