An alternate ending to the tragedy of the commons

I recently read Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons and have been evangelizing it so enthusiastically that I figured I’d do a quick writeup of its main points, and why it’s been so transformative to my thinking.

Elinor Ostrom’s work deals with common pool resource (CPR) management, for which she won a Nobel Prize in economics in 2009. She argues that current game theory doesn’t explain why some commons are, in fact, sustainably managed.