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Douglass North
29quotes
Douglass North
Full Name and Common Aliases
Douglass Carmichael North was an American economist known for his work in economic history, institutional economics, and new institutional economics.
Birth and Death Dates
Born on November 5, 1920, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he passed away on May 23, 2014.
Nationality and Profession(s)
American, Economist
Early Life and Background
Douglass North was born to a family of modest means. His father was an engineer, and his mother was a homemaker. North's interest in economics began at a young age, influenced by the economic downturn of the Great Depression. He pursued higher education at Harvard University, where he earned his undergraduate degree in 1942 and later his Ph.D. in 1955.
Major Accomplishments
North's work spanned multiple fields, including economic history, institutional economics, and new institutional economics. His contributions include:
Developing the concept of transaction costs, which revolutionized understanding of economic behavior.
Co-founding the New Institutional Economics (NIE) movement with Robert Fogel in 1980.
Receiving the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1993 for his work on institutions and their impact on economic growth.Notable Works or Actions
Some notable works include:
"The Economic Growth of the United States" (1966)
"Institutions and Economic Growth: An Historical Introduction" (1981)
"Structure and Change in Economic History" (1989)
North's work on institutions, transaction costs, and economic growth has had a lasting impact on the field of economics.
Impact and Legacy
Douglass North's contributions have reshaped our understanding of economic behavior and institutions. His work has influenced fields beyond economics, including history, sociology, and politics. The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences recognition acknowledged his pioneering efforts in understanding institutions' role in shaping economic outcomes.
Why They Are Widely Quoted or Remembered
Douglass North's groundbreaking research on transaction costs, institutional economics, and new institutional economics has left a lasting legacy. His work continues to influence contemporary debates on economic growth, development, and policy-making.
Quotes by Douglass North
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The supremacy of Parliament and the embedding of property rights in Common Law put political power in the hands of men anxious to exploit the new economic opportunities and provided the framework for a judicial system to protect and encourage productive economic activity.
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To predict the future we would have to know today what we will learn tomorrow which will shape our future actions.
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While I was there my life was completely changed by becoming a convinced Marxist and engaging in a variety of student liberal activities.
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To predict the future we would have to know today what we will learn tomorrow which will shape our future actions
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Economists have the correct insight that economics is a theory of choice, the key to the story is the variety of options and centralised political control limits the options. The best recipe is adaptive efficiency coping with novel uncertainty in a non-ergodic world, the maintenance of institutions which enable trial & error experiment to occur, and an effective means of eliminating unsuccessful solutions
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Conformity can be costly in a world of uncertainty which requires innovative institutional creation because no one can know the right path to survival. Over time, the richer the cultural context in terms of providing multiple experimentation and creative competition, the more likely the successful survival of the society
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The evolution of government from its medieval, Mafia-like character to that embodying modern legal institutions and instruments is a major part of the history of freedom. It is a part that tends to be obscured or ignored because of the myopic vision of many economists, who persist in modeling government as nothing more than a gigantic form of theft and income redistribution.
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Regarding social order, Francis Fukuyama writes, "The systematic study of how order, and thus social capital, can emerge in spontaneous and decentralized fashion is one of the most important intellectual developments of the late twentieth century." He correctly attributes the modern origins of this argument to F. A. Hayek, whose pioneering contributions to cognitive science, the study of cultural evolution, and the dynamics of social change put him in the forefront of the most creative scholars of the 20th century.
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Information costs are reduced by the existence of large numbers of buyers and sellers. Under these conditions, prices embody the same information that would require large search costs by individual buyers and sellers in the absence of an organized market.
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