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You're listening to the Hayek Program Podcast. This podcast includes audio from lectures, interviews and discussions from scholars and visitors of the FA Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the Mercatus center at George Mason University. To learn more about the Hayek Program, visit Hayek Mercatus to learn about graduate student fellowship opportunities with the Mercatus center at George Mason University. For students at Mason as well as at universities across the Globe, please visit students.mercatus.org
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Bobby Herzberg is a distinguished senior fellow at the F.A. hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the Mercatus center at George Mason University and an Instructor Emeritus at Utah State University. She's a past President of the Public Choice Society and the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics. Bobby has extensive experience in academic administration, having served as the department head of the Political Science Department and Administrative Director of the Institute for Political Economy at Utah State and extensive experience in philanthropy, having worked at the John Templeton foundation and serving on boards of various organizations. Her scholarship focuses on institutional economics, public choice, the Bloomington School, having taught there along with the Ostroms, and public policy. Specifically, she explores health care policy, the potential of self governance to provide health care and welfare programs, environmental policy, and much more. Bobbi upholds the importance of theory and practice and the multifaceted interdisciplinary way that we need to study the world around us. Institutional analysis and governance matter for how we live. She thoughtfully balances the need for grounded scholarship and practical policy solutions and she pushes her colleagues and students to do so too. Tonight she will discuss Vincent Ostrom and the meaning of democracy. Please join me in welcoming Bobby Hertzberg.
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Well, it's a big crowd and a big crowd of friends is sometimes the hardest crowd to talk to, even though I'm sure you're all going to be friendly because I care more what you think than a crowd of strangers. So you be patient, be patient with me. I have the honor of of talking about Vincent Ostrom and his theories of democracy with you tonight and that is a real honor for me to be able to do that. But it's also not your best subject matter for a post dinner travel day pre bar experience. I know that this keynote should last no longer than 20 minutes to be really good, maybe 15 to be super good and doing Vincent in that time. So we're going to take the 30,000 foot vision of Vincent's. The Market and Society Journal will publish a longer and more citation filled version of this talk, but hopefully I can share at Least some of the key ideas I think that we should all appreciate in Vincent's work. And I know so many of you know so much about this work. In any case, you'll go, well, why'd she leave that out? Why'd she leave that out? Well, we'll discuss it over the next few days. I hope so. It is a privilege. And the biggest was I was starting to put this together. One of the things that I really appreciated was how much Lynn Ostrom would have loved that we're doing this talk. She got much more tickled when somebody honored Vincent than even one of the great honors of her many honors that she had. So I'm. I'm thinking of her and how she's thinking tonight about all of this and appreciating it. So with that, I'm hoping I'm catching you at the right time between just enough wine that you're pretty mellow, but not quite falling asleep yet. So hold with me. Okay, so let's go. Tonight I would like to talk about someone who spent his life helping us think more clearly about one of the most important and most difficult ideas in human history. The ideas of democracy and how we sustain it. Vincent Ostrom was not only a scholar, but a craftsman of ideas. Someone who believed that democratic life is a form of human artistry, something we make together and must constantly tend to. Born in 1919, love that. In Washington State, just close to the Canadian border, in a very rural area, he grew up surrounded by forests, rivers and farms. His father raised mink and bred mink. That early exposure to how people cooperated to manage shared resources or didn't cooperate to manage those resources stayed with him all of his life. After teaching at the University of Wyoming and Oregon and then ucla, he found his intellectual home at Indiana University, where he and Eleanor Ostrom founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. Together they built not just a research center, but a living laboratory of self governance. And why that is so important that they were able to do that at Indiana University. And I know we have some people from Indiana University here tonight. It was such a special place for them to do that. And it was important because at Wyoming and at ucla, Vincent Ostrom had faced critics that said he should not be participating in the actual policy issues and policy design. It was inappropriate for a scholar. But that could not have been further from the truth for Vincent. He believed he had to be in the mix because that was the most important goal of society. I miss them. Vincent's great project was to understand how people can govern themselves without relying entirely on distant authorities or bureaucratic hierarchies. And that's where we begin. Tonight. I have four key points. A fairly straightforward part of his theories on democracy, but profound, I think, insights that shaped his understanding that I'd like to share with you now. This is my favorite Vincent picture and it's my favorite Vincent picture because that little guy There is my 37 year old son. At an earlier time, you might imagine he's not that guy. Whatever that movie was about the guy going backwards, I forget that one. But what I love about it, you may love it too, is Lynn Ostrom brought back matching jackets from Africa for a toddler and Vincent. And they wore them. It looks good on Glenn. I'm not so sure it quite was Vincent's jam, but he wore it for that picture. So this is one of my very special favorite pictures. So I share that as my key points. Has nothing to do with the key points, but what the hell, it's my talk anyway. Okay, so let's get back to those. So these are the key points and I'm going to go through them in order and hopefully give you just a highlight of each of them. So let's go ahead and get started. So the first one, Vincent began from a very simple but radical observation. Order is not imposed from above, it is constituted from below. It emerges from our common beliefs, he wrote. Order in human societies is constituted by concepts and beliefs that human beings hold in common with one another as customs, laws and rules. That might sound abstract, but think about what it means every time you stop at a red light, return a library book, or don't grab your neighbor's cheesecake off the table. You are participating in a web of shared understanding about appropriate behavior. And that's the way we live most of our lives. No one forces you to do most of these things, at least past the age of your mother, having any control over you. But you do them because you and those around you share certain expectations about what it means to live together. Ostrom insisted that legitimacy in government rests not on command, but on consent and communication. As he put it, officials can command, but individuals do not necessarily obey. We obey when we believe that the rules make sense, when they resonate with our shared understanding of what's right. Those are the rules that stick. And those are the rules that Vincent wanted to understand and wanted people to create for themselves. This is where Vincent's thinking overlaps very much with Alexis de Tocqueville. Both believed that religion, local custom and community life shape how we Interpret the actions of others and build trust. Shared knowledge doesn't just come from ideas, but from deeds, from the way we live together day after day. Ostrom also saw limits to this process. There's only so much that we can understand in large impersonal settings. Individuals engaged in discussion cannot speak and listen simultaneously. Although goodness knows I try to do so a lot. And probably some of you are trying to listen while looking at your phone and having conversations. I see you texting. This happens a lot at Mercatus. I'm just telling you right now, it's like their jam. And anyway, but he reminded us you cannot do that. So earlier times, what can we say? You're all better than he was, I guess. Anyway, that simple fact, one person talking at a time, places limits on how large a community of understanding can be. And boy did he believe that. I can't tell you how many times we, we had the conversation. And he reminded me that the House of Representatives was not a deliberative legislative body. And this was very disturbing to a 27 year old Congress scholar just starting her career. So anyway, they can't deliberate because they're just too big. So that was his attitude on it. He thought that people needed to really get into the process to make the decisions that they reached. And maybe that's one of the reasons why democracy seems so strained today. The scale of our political life has grown far beyond the scale of our conversations. We're trying to deliberate as one giant community of 330 million people, very diverse people, often through screens that make genuine listening almost impossible. Second key point that Vincent raises, individuals. I love this picture too. It's a good one. This is Vincent in Alaska because he made a difference in Alaska, individuals are very capable of self government. From the perspective of Vincent Ostrom, he saw them governing, he saw them doing really hard things like constitution making. And he participated in that. And as a result them working through these things like the Alaska Constitution on Natural Resources, Article 8, which is part of the reason that people get a check now in the state of Alaska, citizens all get royalties. Imagine your government just sending you money because it's your property, not theirs. Doesn't happen in all the other states, but it happens in Alaska. And he was at that conversation because it came from the people, not from Vincent Ostrom, not from the expert. Also California irrigation water, really challenging circumstance. These are situations where we see how people working out the details, listen to one another, argue with one another, have real challenges, but work to find common ground. He understood institutions not as static rules of the game, but as artifacts, things people craft using their local knowledge and skills. And just as artisans learn through practice, citizens learn to govern themselves by doing. He once described a self governing society as one that turns on the universality of artisanship. In such a society, each person first becomes their own governor, someone capable of self mastery, and only then joins others to work out common arrangements. This is deeply hopeful vision of democracy. It's not about designing the perfect constitution or electing the right leaders. It's about cultivating the habits and virtues of self governance, what Tocqueville called the art of association. But Ostrom was no romantic. He knew self governance is hard work. People disagree, they misunderstand each other, they bring different histories and expectations to the table. That's why he valued institutions that slow things down. Deliberative body checks and balances, local councils, places where people can argue, reflect and eventually find common ground. He honestly thought people could do that? I'm not so sure. But he honestly thought they could. That's point three. Then how? And so the concept most commonly associated with Vincent Ostrom and his theories of democracy is the theory of polycentricity and polycentricity as good governance. Together with Charles Thiebaud and Robert Warren, he defined a polycentric system as one with many centers of decision making that are formally independent of each other. In such a system, different problems can be addressed at different levels. Some locally, some regionally, some nationally, with everything being run from the top down. If we imagine different settings, such as maybe a forest ecosystem, there isn't one tree in charge. Instead, you have multiple species, each interacting and adapting to its environment. The result is a resilient whole. That's what Ostrom wanted for human governance. A system of overlapping jurisdictions where cooperation, competition and even conflict can coexist productively. I have to make sure I'm on the right slide, he wrote in the crisis of public administration, that centralization and decentralization must exist simultaneously. True federalism, in his view, means accepting the messiness of overlapping authority. We'd like things to be neat, but neat doesn't really work in large societies with subjective preferences and all kinds of things tearing people in different directions. It's most efficient in the bureaucratic sense, but it's far more adaptable and humane to work in this polycentric system. And that brings us to an important point. Polycentric systems rely on citizens who can navigate complexity. They demand judgment, tolerance and engagement. If we expect Washington or any central authority to fix all our problems, we lose the vitality of democratic life and we lose it to people who seem increasingly incapable of taking it up and taking up that task. And I'm not ready for that. Polycentric governance isn't chaos. It's freedom structured through relationship of trust and accountability. It's the difference between a symphony and a single symphony conductor and a jazz ensemble. And I think I stole that from someone in this room. So if I did, just tell me who I did. So I'll cite you in the right thing, because I don't remember, but I thought that was really good. The jazz one. Anyway. The first imposes order, the second discovers it through collaboration. The fourth key point. It's hard. The fragility of self governance. This is not an easy task. And they understood this. Both the Ostroms understood this. This is them on a hay wagon up. And they used to spend a lot of time up in Canada, at Manitoulin island and in weird places. But anyway, they did well. It was a weird place. No electricity, no anything. 30 miles back and forth on bad roads, once a week to get the mail. Imagine living as an academic, multiple academics, very popular academics for the entire summer. Under those conditions. You guys couldn't leave your phones away for five minutes, you know? Anyway. Oh,
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it's hard.
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Anyway, that's going to show up on the tape. Okay, so it's fragile. Of course. Vincent also warned us that self governance is. Is fragile. It can be derailed by impatience, by the temptation to let others decide for us, or by the belief that unity requires uniformity. He called this the Faustian bargain of politics. To create order, we need inequality of decision making, power, leaders, judges, administrators. But those same powers can easily become instruments of domination. The sanctions necessary for maintaining order, he wrote, may be used to compound wrongs as well as rights. Ostrom saw the dangers long before they became headlines. The tyranny of the majority, democratic despotism, the collapse of the rule of law. He warned that centralization in the presence of great diversity will inevitably entrap mankind and catch 22 situations. In other words, when we try to solve every problem from the top, we create systems so rigid that they defeat their own purpose. Democracies, he wrote, are vulnerable to the vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people. And great experiments become monumental disasters. Those are sobering words, but they're also an invitation to remember that democracy is not something we have, it's something we do. It's a practice, a set of relationships that must be renewed in every generation. So where does that leave us? For Vincent, democracy was not a machine to be engineered But a conversation to be sustained. It requires us to speak honestly, listen carefully, and act responsibly within the limits of our shared understanding. We cannot all agree on everything, probably not even in this room. And we're kind of part of the same crowd. Nor should we try. I mean, how boring would that be? I'm bored already thinking about it. Must be time for a drink. So I'll wrap up. What we can do is build institutions large and small that let us live with our differences while still working toward common purposes. In that sense, the real measure of democracy for Vincent was not how efficiently we govern, but how generously we live together. He was very generous. He really was. Vincent often thanked his students and colleagues for joining him in what he called the adventure of self governing. Tonight, I think he would thank all of us for keeping that adventure alive. So let us raise a glass. Another great picture. This looks like he doesn't even know how to drink a beer, right? Doesn't it? I don't know. I mean, you know, he really wasn't of this world. He was kind of a different character altogether. I really loved. I mean, I loved him. So let us raise a glass. If you still have anything in it. To Vincent Ostrom and to the ongoing experiment in freedom that he helped us understand. Thank you.
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Thank you for listening to the Hayek Program podcast. To learn more about the research scholars and work of the Hayek program, visit hayek.mercatus.org for more information about graduate student fellowship opportunities for students at Mason as well as at universities across the Globe, please visit students.mercatus.org we hope you recommend students to our programs or consider applying yourself.