Historians are not usually in the business of defining laws. We gladly leave that to economists with ego problems: in the male world of the economic science, you are nothing without a law in your name. But there are different types of laws and different types of economists. Our inspiration comes from Elinor Ostrom, whose seminal Governing the Commons was also a critique of excessive modelling among her peers. In this spirit, University of Chicago scholar Lee Fennell came up with what she called “Ostrom’s Law”: “A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory.”[1] We intend to push this a bit further with “Frank’s Law of Monoculture”, or FLOM: “A resource arrangement that cannot work in theory can stumble on in practice.” And no, it’s not a coincidence that you cannot cite FLOM without a smile.

[1] Lee Anne Fennell, "Ostrom’s Law: Property Rights in the Commons," International Journal of the Commons 5 (2011), pp. 9-27; p. 10.