Meeting the Call of Duty at the Dinner Table | Elinor Ostrom | Big Think

Meeting the Call of Duty at the Dinner Table

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If given the opportunity to sit down with anybody, Elinor Ostrom would meet the late labor economist John Commons, who linked the individual’s rights with their responsibilities.

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Elinor Ostrom:

Elinor Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in the Economic Sciences for her analysis of economic governance and commons law. She is the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in Bloomington and Research Professor and the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University in Tempe. She received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D from UCLA and is the author of numerous books, including "Understanding Institutional Diversity."

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: If you could have dinner with anybody, who would it be?

Elinor Ostrom: Well, I would like to have a dinner with John R. Commons, who was a very distinguished labor economist at the University of Wisconsin and whose work I've read multiple times and I still assign to my students. He was struggling with trying to understand how to enable labor to organize more effectively and wrote some of the initial legislation for labor law in Wisconsin and elsewhere. And he had a very interesting philosophy about rights having a counterpart to duties. And so if somebody has a right, somebody has to have a duty! And I would love to discuss with him some of those philosophical foundations.

Recorded on: October 25, 2009