John Joseph Wallis — Structure and change in economic history: The ideas of Douglass North

Douglass North passed away at age 95.

Douglass C. North was among the most important and influential economic historians and economists of the late 20th century. This column highlights four of his major contributions: his pioneering work in quantitative economic history, or ‘cliometrics’; his similarly fundamental work using neoclassical economics to understand institutions; his critique of theory for explaining long-term economic and institutional change; and the distinction he drew between institutions and organisations.

VOXEU
Structure and change in economic history: The ideas of Douglass North

John Joseph Wallis | Professor of Economics, University of Maryland

Douglass North, economic historian and co-recipient of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, passed away this week. This column pays tribute to one of the great social scientific pioneers of the modern era – focusing on one particular example of how North drew on historical, empirical and theoretical evidence to understand the interactions between institutions and economic change.

Douglass North, an economist’s historian

Kevin Bryan
Assistant Professor of Strategic Management, University of Toronto Rotman School of Management

Peter Turchin — Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays

Complex human societies, including our own, are fragile. They are held together by an invisible web of mutual trust and social cooperation. This web can fray easily, resulting in a wave of political instability, internal conflict and, sometimes, outright social collapse.
Analysis of past societies shows that these destabilizing historical trends develop slowly, last many decades, and are slow to subside.

The Roman Empire, Imperial China and medieval and early-modern England and France suffered such cycles, to cite a few examples. In the U.S., the last long period of instability began in the 1850s and lasted through the Gilded Age and the “violent 1910s.”

We now see the same forces in the contemporary U.S. Of about 30 detailed indicators I developed for tracing these historical cycles (reflecting popular well-being, inequality, social cooperation and its inverse, polarization and conflict), almost all have been moving in the wrong direction in the last three decades.

The roots of the current American predicament go back to the 1970s, when wages of workers stopped keeping pace with their productivity. The two curves diverged: Productivity continued to rise, as wages stagnated. The “great divergence” between the fortunes of the top 1 percent and the other 99 percent is much discussed, yet its implications for long-term political disorder are underappreciated. Battles such as the recent government shutdown are only one manifestation of what is likely to be a decade-long period....

Bloomberg
Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays
Peter Turchin | Vice President of the Evolution Institute and Professor of Biology and Anthropology at the University of Connecticut