Douglass North
Douglass North
Douglass Cecil Northwas an American economist known for his work in economic history. He was the co-recipientof the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. In the words of the Nobel Committee, North and Fogel "renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth5 November 1920
CountryUnited States of America
Douglass North quotes about
california records mediocre
My record at the University of California as an undergraduate was mediocre to say the best.
hunting fishing two
I continue to be a photographer; I have enjoyed fishing and hunting with a close friend; and have owned two ranches, first in northern California and then in the state of Washington.
editors wife married
In 1972 I married again, to Elisabeth Case; she continues to be wife, companion, critic and editor: a partner in the projects and programs that we undertake.
sister brother war
My brother and sister are both older than I am and were born before my father went off to World War I.
opportunity men rights
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
photography school winning
While I was there I became deeply interested in photography, and indeed the most noteworthy event in my early life was winning first, third, fourth and seventh prizes in an international competition for college and high school students.
jobs playing-chess firsts
It was not until I got my first job, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and began playing chess with Don Gordon, a brilliant young theorist, that I learned economic theory.
airplane 1960s aeroplanes
I learned to fly an airplane, and had my own airplane during the 1960s.
strong war school
I had hoped to go to law school, but the war started, and because of the strong feeling that I did not want to kill anybody, I joined the Merchant Marine when I graduated from Berkeley.
relationship analysis banking
My early work and publications centered around expanding on the analysis of life insurance in my dissertation and its relationship to investment banking.
family intellectual family-life
Our family life was certainly not intellectual.
war book reading
What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I became convinced that I should become an economist.
school way graduates
I went back to graduate school with the clear intention that what I wanted to do with my life was to improve societies, and the way to do that was to find out what made economies work the way they did or fail to work.
numbers cost information
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.