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Monday’s top of the scroll: Something fishy in the Sacramento Delta … what would a Nobel prize winner do?

Posted by: Maven on October 19, 2009 at 8:23 am

Now I generally don’t like to pick commentaries to be the top of the scroll, because I don’t want to endorse anyone’s particular opinion, so keeping in mind that the top of the scroll is only designating interestingness, check out this editorial from Senior Editorial Writer Alan Bock at the OC Register:

“If officials are smarter than we have any right to expect, we could have something of a harmonic convergence in California’s seemingly perpetual water wars.

Having done some research and talked to various economist friends, if it were up to me I would hire the Bloomington Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, started at Indiana University by this year’s co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science, Elinor Ostrom, and her husband, Vincent, to come up with a long-term solution to irrigation in the San Joaquin Valley.

In the short run, unfortunately, things look pretty grim for the valley’s farmers and perhaps for the country’s food supply.

This isn’t solely due to a 3-inch fish called the Delta smelt, which lives in the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta area, where several rivers converge to flow into the San Francisco Bay and out to sea – and where the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project have built dams and pumping stations to feed water to Southern California and the Central Valley’s agricultural industries. This is the third year of drought in California (though El Niño conditions may make for a wet winter at last). A collapse in dairy prices, the mortgage foreclosure crisis, job losses in the construction industry and the global financial crisis have all contributed to the area’s woes. …”

So what would the co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science, Elinor Ostrom, do? Find out by clicking here to read the rest of this editorial from the OC Register.

Oh go on, take the click through…. it’s a different answer than you’ve likely heard before, and surprisingly, for an economist, it isn’t “markets”…..!

October 19, 2009 · Filed Under Delta Issues

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