MANY people don't realise the economics we hear from politicians, business people, economists and the media morning, noon and night is just one way of analysing how the economy works.
Almost everything we're told about what causes what is inspired by the ''neoclassical'' model. It's long been the dominant way of explaining why things happen and predicting what will happen, but it's not the only way. And it's far from infallible.
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But there was one obdurate woman who, lacking an economics education, wasn't impressed by the economists' neat analysis of the problem and thought there might be another, better solution - if, indeed, it was a problem.
She was Elinor Ostrom, professor of political science at Indiana University, who devoted much of her career to combing the world for examples where people had developed ways of regulating their use of common resources without resorting to either private property rights or government intervention.
As The Economist records, she found forests in Nepal, irrigation systems in Spain, villages in Switzerland and Japan, and fisheries in Maine and Indonesia. In all these cases, people drew up sensible rules for sharing the resource and combining to perform regular repairs. People who broke the rules were fined or eventually excluded.
''The schemes were mutual and reciprocal, and many had worked well for centuries,'' the magazine says.
For her pains, Ostrom, who died last month, was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 2009, the first woman so honoured. Few economists had heard of her or her model-busting work.
Why had this solution to the problem never been considered by economists? Because of their model's implicit assumption that we only ever act as individuals, never collectively. We compete against each other, but we never co-operate to solve mutual problems.
And, since all the market's benefits come via competition, co-operation by producers is probably an attempt to rig the market, which should be outlawed.
The community pays a high price for allowing one model of how the economy works to dominate the advice we get and the way we think.
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