Scientific Indiana: Elinor Ostrom

My book Scientific Indiana provides biographical sketches of seventeen scientists with a significant connection to the Hoosier State. Unfortunately, all of the scientists are male. Presumably, this results from the fact that women have not enjoyed the same educational and professional opportunities as men. It will take time for this to change. Nevertheless, Indiana has had some high-achieving women. One of those is Elinor Ostrom, an Indiana University professor who won the Nobel Prize in economics - the first woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in that field. But economics isn’t a natural science, so I very reluctantly had to leave her out of the book. I hope I can make up for the omission with this essay.  

Elinor Claire Awan was born on August 7, 1933 in Los Angeles. She was the only child of Adrian Awan, a set designer, and Leah Hopkins, a musician. Early in her life, Elinor’s parents separated and she spent most of her time with her mother. As the daughter of two artists during the Great Depression, it is not surprising that Elinor described herself as a “poor kid.” But her mother’s house had a big back yard with room enough for a vegetable garden and fruit trees. In her Nobel Prize autobiography, Ostrom says that “My childhood was spent learning and doing the traditional activities of a girl during the last century.” She learned how to grow vegetables and can fruit. During the war years, she knitted scarves for soldiers.

But the poor kid caught a lucky break because she lived right across the street from Beverly Hills High School, one of the top high schools in the country. During her high school years, Elinor participated in two extracurricular activities: the swim team and the debate squad. Being on the debate team helped Elinor hone her thinking skills and taught her that there were always two sides to an argument. She was not immune to the sexual stereotypes common at the time. For example, as a girl, she was discouraged from taking trigonometry. As we shall see, this lack of mathematical preparation would have consequences later in her education.  

When Elinor graduated from high school in 1951, neither of her parents encouraged her to go to college. According to Ostrom, “My mother saw no reason to support me during my college years since she had been supported only through high school.” But positive peer pressure overcame parental indifference. Nine out of ten graduates from Beverly Hills High School attended college leaving Elinor to conclude that it was just the normal thing to do. So she enrolled at UCLA and worked at the library, a bookstore, and a dime store to earn enough money to pay her expenses. By taking summer classes and extra classes during the academic year, she was able to graduate with honors in three years.

Ostrom married a classmate, Charles Scott, and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts so that Scott could attend law school at Harvard. To make ends meet, Ostrom worked at General Radio. The marriage only lasted a few years; the couple divorced and Ostrom moved back to Los Angeles. Over the next several years, she held a series of traditional female secretarial and clerical jobs. Finally, she landed an untraditional job as an assistant personnel manager for a business firm that had never hired a woman for anything except a secretarial job. Ostrom claimed that the jobs she held in her early twenties taught her an important lesson: “I learned not to take initial rejections as being permanent obstacles to moving ahead.”

Over time, Ostrom began to think about pursuing a doctoral degree. According to Ostrom: “My initial discussions with the Economics Department at UCLA about obtaining a Ph.D. were, however, pretty discouraging.” The problem was that she had not taken any mathematics courses as an undergraduate because of her lack of mathematics in high school. And economics is a highly mathematical field. So Ostrom turned to political science. But the Political Science department was reluctant to allow any women into the program because, they argued, women graduates would only be hired by lowly city colleges and thereby diminish the reputation of the department. Nevertheless, Ostrom was admitted into a political science class of forty students that included three other women. The women later heard that a heated discussion had taken place in which the faculty had criticized the admissions committee for allowing women into the doctoral program and awarding them assistantships. Ostrom claims that her fellow male graduate students had a much more accepting attitude and encouraged the women to continue their studies. 

For her graduate work, Ostrom participated in a research team studying Southern California’s water industry. Ostrom’s work focused on studying the political economy of a group of underwater basins. She was assigned the West Basin, which lay underneath several cities along the Pacific Coast, including part of Los Angeles. Her research found that it is very difficult to manage a common-pool resource when it is shared by individuals. (A common-pool resource is a resource made available to all by consumption and to which access can be limited only at high cost. Examples of common-pool resources include forests, fisheries, irrigation systems, and underwater basins.) The locals were pumping too much groundwater out of the basin which allowed salt water to seep in. Ostrom discovered that people from competing and overlapping jurisdictions that were dependent on the source found ways to settle their disputes and solve their problems. She made the study of this collaboration the topic of her dissertation. In 1965, Ostrom defended her thesis and earned her Ph.D. in political science.

In the process of doing her research, Elinor met Vincent Ostrom, an assistant professor of political science who was fourteen years older than she was. The couple married in 1963 and began a lifelong personal and professional partnership. In 1961, Vincent co-authored an influential article titled “The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas.” The article advised against centralization of metropolitan areas and instead, argued for having many centers of control or authority, an idea that became known as “polycentrism.” Unfortunately, this position ran counter to that of UCLA’s Bureau of Government Research. This conflict resulted in the Ostroms leaving Los Angeles in 1965 when Vincent accepted a position as a full professor at Indiana University. 

Elinor was not initially offered a job because, she says, “it was very hard for any department to hire a woman in those days.” Eventually, the department needed someone to teach an early morning class titled “Introduction to American Government.” The class met at 7:30 a.m. and nobody wanted to teach it. So the department asked Elinor and she agreed. Elinor was named a Visiting Assistant Professor and taught the class to dreary-eyed freshmen. After a year, she was asked to assume the role of Graduate Advisor and was awarded a regular appointment. Elinor spent her first fifteen years at IU doing research on policing with a focus on police industry structure and performance. She found that small to medium-sized police departments with 25 to 50 officers were as effective in performing tasks (patrol, traffic control, response services, and criminal investigation) as were large departments with over a hundred officers.

In the 1980s, Elinor returned to the study of common-pool resources (also known as “the commons”). The details of her work can be read about elsewhere, but it is nicely summarized in the following statement from her Nobel Prize information: “It was long unanimously held among economists that natural resources that were collectively used by their users would be over-exploited and destroyed in the long-term. Elinor Ostrom disproved this idea by conducting field studies on how people in small, local communities manage shared natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters, and forests. She showed that when natural resources are jointly used by their users, in time, rules are established for how these are to be cared for and used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable.” It was for this work that Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, a prize she shared with Oliver E. Williamson of the University of California at Berkeley.

Ostrom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in October of 2011. During the last year of her life, she continued to write and lecture. Her last article, “Green from the Grassroots,” was published on her last day. She died on June 12, 2012 at age 78. Her husband, Vincent, died seventeen days later from complications from cancer. He was 92. She left her Nobel Prize money to a workshop she and Vincent had established on campus. A statue of Elinor Ostrom now graces the grounds around IU’s political science department.