Douglass C. North

Awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1993 jointly with Robert W. Fogel “for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change”

North has spent more than 50 years pondering complex variations of a simple question:  Why do some countries become rich, while others remain poor?  He holds B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.

His academic career began at the University of Washington in Seattle.  He was the Peterkin Professor of Political Economics at Rice University, 1979, Pitt Professor of American Institutions at Cambridge University, 1981, and currently is the Bartlett Burnap Senior Fellow at Hoover Institution.

He joined Washington University in 1983, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1987, a Fellow of the British Academy, 1996, and the first Spencer T. Olin Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University, 1996.

He has lectured at most major American and European, and many Asian universities and is the author of numerous articles and ten books.  Using insights from cognitive and behavioral science to better understand economic change over time resulted in his book titled Understanding the Process of Economic Change, Princeton, 2005.

His most recent book, co-authored with Barry Weingast and John Wallis, titled Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (2009) centers on a study that considers the role of violence as a part of the developmental process.