Mead Treadwell, a senior fellow of the Institute of the North, e-mails about yesterday’s Nobel economics news:

Elinor Ostrom’s selection as a Nobel Laureate is good news.
Ostrom has, in her career, done quiet battle with the government leviathan by showing that commonly owned resources (fisheries, water rights, land, trees, etc.) can be managed by cooperation among users, and that the “tragedy of the commons” approach Hardin laid out in his 1968 article calling for limits to freedom, even to reproduce, often aren’t necessary or appropriate.
While the Norwegian selection of the president left many –including the president — wondering why now, the selection of Ostrom, formerly a winner of the Skyte Prize, is overdue.
At the Institute of the North, here in Alaska, we had the pleasure of honoring her husband, collaborator and mentor with the Robert O. Anderson Award in 2003, as we hosted the Ostroms, Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith, Icelandic president Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, and leading scholars of the commons for a meeting of the International Association for the Study of Common Property. We’ve always appreciated the role her husband, Dr. Vincent Ostrom, had in drafting the first and only natural-resources clause in a state constitution, recognizing the responsibilities which come with government ownership of Alaska’s vast resources. And Gov. Wally Hickel’s book, Crisis in the Commons: The Alaska Solution, explains in practice some of Ostrom’s theories which argue that putting control of resource decisions in local hands is sustainable for both economy and environment.