Douglass North and Cliometrics

Douglass North (1920–2015) was one of the founders of the disciplines of cliometrics and the New Institutional Economics. He spent over six decades teaching economics and economic history at the University of Washington (1950–1981) and Washington University in St. Louis (1983–2015). In the 1950s and 1960s, North applied neoclassical economic models and quantitative techniques to major problems in US economic history and made significant advances on such topics as interregional trade, ocean shipping productivity, the US balance of payments, and sources of US growth. Switching his attention to European economic history from the late 1960s, North became convinced that economic historians needed to adopt a broader approach to analyzing long-run economic change that explicitly accounted for how economies were embedded in political, economic, and cultural institutions. After the publication of two major books using his new approach, Structure and Change in Economic History and Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, North and Robert Fogel were awarded the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Over the next 22 years, North’s frame of analysis continued to expand. In his 2005 book, Understanding the Process of Economic Change, he argued that economists needed to draw from the sciences of human cognition and social psychology to understand why institutions form and how they change. In his last book, Violence and Social Orders (co-authored with John Wallis and Barry Weingast), North made the case that institutions arise in most societies to control the use of violence and are capable of supporting an open political order only in limited circumstances.