Bucking conventional wisdom can be rewarding....it can win you a Nobel Prize in economics or achieve economic growth for your country.

In the Americas, conventional wisdom extols private property, everybody for themselves, corporate power, unrestricted markets, unregulated financial industry, and free not fair trade, as opposed to supporting and promoting the common good benefiting all the people.

But there are those who understand the truth, virtue, and rewards of championing co-operative efforts for the whole of society. 

Here are two recent, excellent examples.

From Jay Walljasper at Yes!Magazine via CommonDreams: 

"The biggest roadblock standing in the way of many people's recognition of the importance of the commons came tumbling down when Indiana University professor Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for Economics.

"Over many decades, Ostrom has documented how various communities manage common resources — grazing lands, forests, irrigation waters, fisheries — equitably and sustainably over the long term. The Nobel Committee's recognition of her work effectively debunks popular theories about the Tragedy of the Commons, which hold that private property is the only effective method to prevent finite resources from being ruined or depleted.

"Awarding the world's most prestigious economics prize to a scholar who champions cooperative behavior greatly boosts the legitimacy of the commons as a framework for solving our social and environmental problems. Ostrom's work also challenges the current economic orthodoxy that there are few, if any, alternatives to privatization and markets in generating wealth and human well being.

"While right-wing thinkers scoffed at the possibility of resources being shared in a way that maintains the common good, arguing that private property is the only practical strategy to prevent this tragedy, Ostrom's scholarship shows otherwise.

" 'What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people involved,' she explains.

"Equally noteworthy is the fact that Ostrom was not trained as an economist, but as a political scientist — a factor that may be even more useful in explaining her outside-the-box approach to economics.

"Yale economist Robert Schiller, quoted in the New York Times, welcomed the merging of the two fields. " 'Economics has become too isolated and stuck on the view that markets are efficient and self-regulating. It has derailed our thinking.'

"...her selection as a Nobel Laureate marks an early milestone in the emergence of a commons-based society. Her works shows that our social, environmental and personal advancement depends on the vitality of the commons."

As Mark Weisbrot writes at The Guardian:  "Among the conventional wisdom that we hear every day in the business press is that developing countries should bend over backwards to create a friendly climate for foreign corporations, follow orthodox (neoliberal) macro-economic policy advice and strive to achieve an investment-grade sovereign credit rating so as to attract more foreign capital.

"Guess what country is expected to have the fastest economic growth in the Americas this year? Bolivia. The country's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, was elected in 2005 and took office in January 2006. Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, had been operating under IMF agreements for 20 consecutive years, and its per-capita income was lower than it had been 27 years earlier.

"Evo sent the IMF packing just three months after he took office, and then moved to re-nationalise the hydrocarbons industry (mostly natural gas). Needless to say this did not sit well with the international corporate community. Nor did Bolivia's decision in May 2007 to withdraw from the World Bank's international arbitration panel, which had a tendency to settle disputes in favour of international corporations and against governments.

"Bolivia's growth through the current world downturn is even more remarkable in that it was hit hard by falling prices for its most important exports – natural gas and minerals – and also by a loss of important export preferences in the US market..Public investment increased from 6.3% of GDP in 2005 to 10.5% in 2009..

"Bolivia expelled the US ambassador because of evidence that the embassy was supporting a violent rightwing opposition that was trying to topple the government. In any case, the Obama administration has so far not changed the Bush administration's policies toward Bolivia. But Bolivia has proven that it can do quite well without Washington's co-operation.

"Ecuador's leftist president, Rafael Correa, is an economist who, well before he was elected in December 2006, understood and wrote about the limitations of neoliberal economic dogma. He took office in 2007 and established an international tribunal to examine the legitimacy of the country's debt. In November 2008 the commission found that part of the debt was not legally contracted, and in December Correa announced that the government would default on roughly $3.2bn of its international debt.

"He was vilified in the business press, but the default was successful. Ecuador cleared a third of its foreign debt off its books by defaulting and then buying the debt back at about 35 cents on the dollar. The country's international credit rating remains low, but no lower than it was before Correa's election, and it was even raised a notch after the buyback was completed.

"The Correa government also incurred foreign investors' wrath by renegotiating its deals with foreign oil companies to capture a larger share of revenue as oil prices rose. And Correa has bucked pressure from Chevron and its powerful allies in Washington to drop his support of a lawsuit against the company for alleged pollution of ground waters, with damages that could exceed $27bn.

"How has Ecuador done? Growth has averaged a healthy 4.5% over Correa's first two years. And the government has made sure that it has trickled down: healthcare spending as a percent of GDP has doubled, and social spending in general has expanded considerably from 5.4% to 8.3% of GDP in two years.

"Ecuador's growth will probably come in at about 1% this year, which is pretty good relative to most of the hemisphere...."

It's too bad that in the early 1990's there was not an Evo Morales or Rafael Correa leading the emerging countries of Central and Eastern Europe to resoundingly refuse the destructive financial and economic machinations of the IMF and the World Bank that wreaked havoc on these nascent nations after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the break-up of the Soviet Union, and the inevitable dissolution of that artificially created country called Yugoslavia.