Local Bloomington resident, Elinor Ostrom has passed away.
She was the only woman to win a Noble Prize for Economics.
I can't begin to explain how I feel about being so lucky to have actually met her. I only met her once a a cocktail reception for a local non profit... but our conversation was truly engaging. She was so low key and down to earth but smart as a whip and could crack jokes like no other. Having trained in economics it was so uplifting to see the trail she had blazed for us. My only hope is to be have the economist she was.
I feel very fortunate to have met her in the flesh and if I hadn't moved to Bloomington I don't think that would have ever happened. One Reason why I love this town.
Below is an article from MSNBC By Patrick Rizzo
The first and only woman ever to have received the Nobel Prize for Economics, Elinor Ostrom, has died, Indiana University said Tuesday. She was 78.
Ostrom won the prize for her research on the way people organize themselves to manage resources, said the university where she was senior research director of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Distinguished Professor and Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science in the College of Arts and Sciences, and professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Ostom, who had been on Indiana's faculty since 1965, shared the prize in 2009 with University of California, Berkeley economist Oliver Williamson.
Indiana U. said Ostrom died Tuesday morning of cancer at the IU Health Bloomington Hospital. She had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer late last year. In April, she was named to Time Magazine's 2012 list of "The 100 Most Influential People in the World" along with people such as Warren Buffett, Harvey Weinstein and Jeremy Lin.
When she won the Nobel Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said: "Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories.”
Ostrom is survived by her husband and colleague Vincent Ostrom.
