Russ Roberts Latest Podcast --- Discussing Elinor and Vincent Ostrom

|Peter Boettke|

The latest EconTalk is now available.  It is an hour long conversation with me on my book, Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development: The Bloomington School (Routledge, 2009).  I haven't listened to it yet (always have a hard time listening to myself, though I probably have been accused of the opposite on more than one occasion), but I hope that I did justice to the wonderful contributions of Lin and Vincent to the field of political economy, and in particular to their educational mission of cultivating a self-governing citizenry. 

Thanks Russ for the opportunity.

Comments

[The_Orlonater]

Should be interesting, thanks for taking the time.

[Dave Prychitko]

Pete is on the top of his game. Terrific interview.

[netsp]

Hi Peter,

I am a regular Econtalk listener & I enjoyed this week's podcast a lot. You did a great job.

I put a quote on the Podcasts comment section that I am going to repeat here that relates to the Bali case:

"The one I have in mind at the moment is one that describes the culture and economy of Bali, which is a small, very crowded island that subsists on rice. Now, rice is an incredibly efficient food and you can grow an awful lot in a relatively small space, but it's hugely labour intensive and requires a lot of very, very precise co-operation amongst the people there, particularly when you have a large population on a small island needing to bring its harvest in. People now looking at the way in which rice agriculture works in Bali are rather puzzled by it because it is intensely religious. The society of Bali is such that religion permeates every single aspect of it and everybody in that culture is very, very carefully defined in terms of who they are, what their status is and what their role in life is. It's all defined by the church; they have very peculiar calendars and a very peculiar set of customs and rituals, which are precisely defined and, oddly enough, they are fantastically good at being very, very productive with their rice harvest. In the 70s, people came in and noticed that the rice harvest was determined by the temple calendar. It seemed to be totally nonsensical, so they said, 'Get rid of all this, we can help you make your rice harvest much, much more productive than even you're, very successfully, doing at the moment. Use these pesticides, use this calendar, do this, that and the other'. So they started and for two or three years the rice production went up enormously, but the whole predator/prey/pest balance went completely out of kilter. Very shortly, the rice harvest plummeted again and the Balinese said, 'Screw it, we're going back to the temple calendar!' and they reinstated what was there before and it all worked again absolutely perfectly. It's all very well to say that basing the rice harvest on something as irrational and meaningless as a religion is stupid - they should be able to work it out more logically than that, but they might just as well say to us, 'Your culture and society works on the basis of money and that's a fiction, so why don't you get rid of it and just co-operate with each other' - we know it's not going to work!"

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[John Strong]

O.k., I am also going to make a cross post, just because I am eager to hear someone's view about this. Here's what I posted at EconTalk:

DNA of Liberalism.

Pete Boettke mentions Vincent Olstrom's notion that "a sickness in the government can breed a sickness in the people."

Will someone please comment on this?

This is a tantalizing (and yet frustrating) statement, because the causal chain is so elusive.

Which is it? Do "public choice problems" so debilitate a society that it fails to be liberal and democratic? That is what Vincent Olstrom says according to Pete Boettke (I think). Or is it some deeper "cultural" dysfunction that produces an anti-liberal corporativist state? Which is the chicken and which is the egg? I generally dislike the appeal to culture, since it is usually just a convenient way of throwing up your hands and confessing that you're clueless.

Put another way: does the corporativist state debilitate the populace and create anti-liberal values? Or do anti-liberal values lead to a corporativist state and a society of rent-seekers?

[Peter Boettke]

John,

The claim is a difficult one because, as you put it, the causal chain is so elusive. But I do believe that the claim being made in my reading of The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies is that the public choice problems eventually atrophe the self-governing capacity of the citizenry.

Pete

[John Strong]

Sounds like Ostrom's book makes a point similar to Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations.

[Peter Boettke]

Not quite the same John. A more Democracy in America sort of point actually, than a Rise and Decline point.

It relates to the self-governing capabilities of the citizenry.

Pete