Elinor Ostrom

Origins and early life

Elinor Claire Awan was born in Los Angeles on 7 August 1933, the only child of Leah Hopkins, a musician, and Adrian Awan, a set designer, and grew up through the Great Depression with a vegetable garden in the backyard. Her father was Jewish and her mother Protestant; her parents separated early, she was raised a Protestant and went to church with her mother, and she often spent weekends with her father's sister, who kept a kosher home.

Work and career

Children circled her in the schoolroom and the playground shouting “You Jew”, and she said that this, and being a woman, had given her sympathy for people not at the centre of civic appreciation. Beverly Hills High School set her on the road to college, and she paid her own way through UCLA by working in the library, a dime store and the bookstore, graduating in three years in 1954. Turned away from a doctorate in economics because as a girl she had been steered away from mathematics, she was admitted in political science, studied the West Basin groundwater beneath the coastal cities, and finished her doctorate in 1965.

She wed the political scientist Vincent Ostrom in 1963, followed him to Indiana University in Bloomington in 1965, and in 1973 the two founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis there. After fifteen years on American police departments she turned to pastures, fisheries, forests and irrigation systems, and her 1990 book Governing the Commons showed that people who share a resource often devise rules to use it in a way both economically and ecologically sustainable.

Recognition

In 2009 she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, shared equally with Oliver Williamson, her half “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons”. She died in Bloomington on 12 June 2012, at seventy-eight, having written to her co-authors about their work the day before.