A Lexicon of Social Well-Being

Abstract

Commons have gradually become scarce and crucial, and they are still too absent from the culture and practice of economics and politics. Common goods made their first appearance in economics in 1911.1 After a long eclipse they again appeared at the end of the past century in the work of Elinor Ostrom, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009. In the earlier work we find three central points on commons: it was a study on water, it had a historical perspective, and it was written by a woman, Katharine Coman.