1 Yay, 1 Boo
Yay:
First woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. And are we entirely surprised to hear that Ostrom was working in a branch outside the financial mainstream? Pretty much par for the course where women are concerned:
She also faced the hurdles common to most women of her generation entering the sciences - she was discouraged from taking a PhD when she applied for graduate school.
Her field of study has been striking for how cross-disciplinary it is. Early on she gained a reputation for bringing economics, political science and sociology together.
What interests her is how common property can be managed successfully through groups in society. One of the first subjects that interested her was management of water resources.She has also looked at the management of fish stocks, pastures, woods and groundwater basins.
The findings of her research have been striking, as the Nobel committee pointed out, because they have challenged the established assumption that common property is poorly managed unless it is either regulated by government or privatised. She has shown how disparate individuals can band together and form collectives that protect the resource at hand.
However, a big Boo to patriachal genealogy in a profile of Professor Denny Mitchison, still active at 90:
As the grandson of the great physiologist JS Haldane, who made crucial discoveries about the effects of gases on the human body via experiments such as starving himself of oxygen in sealed chambers, and the nephew of the geneticist and evolutionary biologist JBS Haldane, he feels he was pretty much born into science, and sees nothing wrong with the children of medical professionals frequently following in their parents' footsteps.
....
When he first arrived at Cambridge, he was more interested in politics than studying (his father was the Labour politician Dick Mitchison and he held "very leftwing" views)
And which other member of his family was not only still alive but still active in her 90s?
His mother, Naomi Mitchison, who is completely occluded here.
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