A Platinum Nobel Prize Winner

We've all received news by now that President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize and the general surprise that's followed, but recent announcement of 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences award winners Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom is apparently causing a stir in the economic profession. Williamson won for his work in New Institutional Economics, and Ostrom for her work on the theory and practice of institutional economics. Ostrom is the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

According to economist Steven Levitt, author of best-seller Freakonomics,

the economics profession is going to hate the prize going to Ostrom even more than Republicans hated the Peace prize going to Obama. Economists want this to be an economists’ prize (after all, economists are self-interested). This award demonstrates, in a way that no previous prize has, that the prize is moving toward a Nobel in Social Science, not a Nobel in economics.

He says this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but that his colleagues would find it unpopular. I don't know what 'circles' Levitt travels in, but news of Ostrom's receipt of the award has generated quite a positive reaction from the scholars I know. Ostrom isn't mainstream and therefore, according to Levitt, would ruffle the feathers of the economic community because (1) she is not well-known, and (2) apparently isn't enough of an economist for him.

Read Paul Dragos Aligica's article at Reason about her. He and many other scholars, ecstatic about Ostrom's winning the prize, have been very vocal about their reactions. AP quotes Dragos here:

"Until her work, the thinking was, 'let the state intervene,'" said Paul Dragos Aligica, a political scientist at George Mason University. "'If you leave it to individuals to do whatever they want, resources will be depleted.' But she said `hold on' and found that's not the case." Aligica wrote his doctorate under Ostrom's guidance.

Not all the Nobel Prize announcements have been confusing or disheartening.