Encontré unas interesantes entrevistas de 2003 a los esposos Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012, premio Nobel de Economía 2009) y Vincent Ostrom (1919-2012). Ambos politólogos, estaban interesados en dialogar/debatir con los economistas sobre las forma de analizar y tratar las posibles soluciones privadas y públicas a las fallas de mercado.
En primer lugar, Vincent Ostrom:
Probably the best way to characterize our approach would be to start with one of our most influential themes: the idea that broad concepts such as “markets” and “states,” or “socialism” or “capitalism,” do not take us very far in thinking about paterns of human society. For example, when some “market” economists speak of “capitalism,” they fail to distinguish between an open, competitive market economy and state-dominated mercantile economy. In this, they follow Marx. He argued that “capitalism” has a competitive dynamic that leads to market domination by a few large monopoly or monopoly-like enterprises. But what Marx called “capitalism,” Adam Smith called “mercantilism.” Similarly, many authors who write about “capitalism” fail to recognize the complexity of capitalist economic institutions. They overlook the rich structures of comunal and public enterprises in societies with open and highly competitive market economies.
Instead, we should expect to find some combination of market and non-market structures in every society, and we sholud recognize the complex configuration of institutions behind labesl such as “capitalism.” Whe might usefully think about combinations of private and public economies existing side by side. However, it’s important to stress that not all forms of public enterprises are, or need to be, state-owned and operated. Various forms of comunal of public ownership may exist apart from state ownership. […]Más adelante:
We need no think of “government” or “governance” as something provided by state alone. Families, voluntary associations, villages, and other forms of human associations all involve some form of self-government. Rather than looking only to states, we need to give much more attention to building the kinds of basic institutional structures that enable people to find ways of relating constructively to one another and of resolving problems in their daily lives.Por su parte, Elinor Ostrom:
On the one hand, when economists show that market arrangements fail, they are frequently willing to make simple recommendations that “the” State should take care of these problems without asking how incentives are generated with-in state burocracies to improve performance. The existing theory of collective action, which underlies the work of all political economists, had accentuated the presumed necessity of the State as an alternative to the Market, since the accepted theory predicts that voluntary self-organization to provide public godos or manage commom-pool resources is highly unlikely. On the other hand, when political scientists and policy analysists show that over-centralized governmental units fail to perform, they sometimes recomend “privatization” without working throuht the logic of how to create a set of private incentives that increase performance and accountability.Llama la atención la visión de los Ostrom sobre el énfasis de los economistas. Con pocos economistas he podido platicar sobre el trabajo de Elinor Ostrom (la más conocida de los dos por haber ganado el premio Nobel de Economía), siendo los politólogos y sociólogos los más dispuestos a discutir su trabajo. Lo interesante es que en las discusiones normalmente se indica que Elinor Ostrom “demostró” que existen otras soluciones diferentes a las privatizaciones o enfocadas en mercados que suelen proponer los economistas, cuando ella y su esposo parecían más preocupados en que los economistas tienden a proponer soluciones basadas en el gobierno.
Lo que en particular no les gustaban era que esas acciones basadas en el gobierno fueran mecanismos centralizados, y que se dejaran de explorar otras formas de organización. Elinor Ostrom lo resume así:
My academic career has been devoted to the development of emipically grounded theories to cross the great divide between economics and the other social sciences in the conduct of comparative institutional analysis. [...]Vernon Smith, premio Nobel de Economía en 2001, lo ve en los siguientes términos:
[Elinor Ostrom's] approach is methodologically Coasian, only that Ronald Coase, seeing that economic theorists had said much only about inevitable failure of decentralized mechanisms to solve public good incentive problems, seeing that a favorite example used was the light house, asked a simple question: “Let’s have a look at how people has organized the delivery of light house services.” The answer, as is well known, is that they were privately founded, and pleople found ways to make sure that the ships that benefited paid for it when they stopped at ports!
