Douglass North

Douglass Cecil North (born November 5, 1920) is an American economist known for his work in the history of economic thought. He is the co-recipient (with Robert William Fogel) of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. In the words of the Nobel Committee, North and Fogel were awarded the prize "for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change."

Biography

Douglass North was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 5th, 1920. North moved several times as a child due to his father's work at MetLife, living in Cambridge, Ottawa, Lausanne, New York City and Wallingford.

North was accepted at Harvard at the same time that his father became the head of MetLife on the west coast, so North opted to go to University of California, Berkeley. In 1942, North graduated with a B.A. in General Curriculum-Humanities. Although his grades amounted to slightly better than a "C" average, North graduated with a triple major in political science, philosophy and economics.

As a conscientious objector to World War II, not wanting to kill anyone, North became a navigator in the Merchant Marines, traveling between San Francisco and Australia. During this time, North read economics and picked up his childhood hobby of photography. He taught navigation at the Maritime Service Officers' School in Alameda during the last year of the war, and struggled with the decision to become a photographer or an economist.^[1]

North decided to return to school at Berkeley to pursue a PhD in economics. North finished his studies in 1952 and began work as an assistant professor at the University of Washington. He was Professor of Economics at the University of Washington from 1950 - 1983. He joined the faculty of Washington University in Saint Louis in 1983 as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Law and Liberty in the Department of Economics, and served as director of the Center for Political Economy from 1984 to 1990. North held the position of Pitt Professor of American Institutions at Cambridge University in 1981. In 1991, he became the first economic historian to win one of the economics profession's most prestigious honors, the John R. Commons Award ^[2], which was established by the International Honors Society for Economics in 1965.

North has served as an expert for the Copenhagen Consensus and as an advisor to governments around the world. He is currently engaged in research (co-authored with John J. Wallis of the University of Maryland and Barry Weingast of Stanford University) on how countries emerge out of what they call "the natural state" and into long-run economic growth. He is a trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security and a special adviser to the non-profit organization Vipani.

North is currently Bartlett Burnap Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University ^[3].

Current work

Along with Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson, he helped found the International Society for the New Institutional Economics which held its first meeting in St. Louis in 1997. His current research includes property rights, transaction costs, and economic organization in history as well as economic development in developing countries.

Major publications

• Location Theory and Regional Economic Growth, University of Chicago Press, 1955
• The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860, Prentice Hall, 1961.
• Institutional Change and American Economic Growth, Cambridge University Press, 1971 (with Lance Davis).
• The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History, 1973 (with Robert Thomas).
• Growth and Welfare in the American Past, Prentice-Hall, 1974.
• Structure and Change in Economic History, Norton, 1981.
• Institutions and economic growth: An historical introduction, Elsevier, 1989
• Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England, Cambridge University Press, 1989
• Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Institutions, American Economic Association, 1991
• Economic Performance through Time, American Economic Association, 1994
• Empirical Studies in Institutional Change, Cambridge University Press, 1996 (edited with Lee Alston & Thrainn Eggertsson).
• Understanding the Process of Economic Change, Princeton University Press, 2005.
• Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, Cambridge University Press, 2009 (with John Joseph Wallis and Barry R. Weingast).

^[4][5]

References

External links

• 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics
• CNISS
• Hoover Institution homepage
• Douglass C. North – Autobiography
• IDEAS/RePEc