Obituary: Douglass C. North, Nobel Prize-winning economist, 95

November 24, 2015

By Gerry Everding

Douglass C. North, PhD, co-recipient of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and the Spencer T. Olin Professor Emeritus in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died Monday, Nov. 23, 2015, at his summer home in Benzonia, Mich. He was 95.

An economic historian, North examined the formation of political and economic institutions and the consequences of these institutions on the performance of economies through time.

In 1993, North and Robert Fogel, PhD, then an economist with the University of Chicago, won the Nobel in economic sciences “for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change.”

During his academic career, which spanned more than 60 years, he pondered complex variations of a simple question: Why do some countries become rich, while others remain poor?
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Prize Lecture