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To learn more about New Institutional Economics and John Nye's work visit: http://mercatus.org/john-nye
The Nobel Prize-winning economist, Douglas North (1920-2015) has passed away at the age of 95 years old.
Douglas North was a leading developer of that has come to be called the "New Institutionalism," or an approach that gives emphasis and focus to the nature, significance and evolution of social, economic and political institutions in the context of which human beings may be able to prosper with wide degrees of personal freedom and choice.
He never felt comfortable wearing a political label on his sleeve, and was not a proponent of radical free market economics. But, nonetheless, economic and social history assisted his sharp analytical mind in understanding and explaining that human change and progress is based on three elements, as he once said:
"Economic change is the result of changes, one, in the quantity and quality of human beings; two, in the stock of human knowledge, particularly as it applies to human command over nature; and, three, to the institutional matrix that defines the incentive structure of society."
Central to North's story was that too many "mainstream" economists focus on mechanical models that presume that the future will be like the past, and that therefore the future may in many ways be predicted from the observed human events of the past.
What this ignored, North insisted, was the power of ideas. Not only that "ideas" shape the world. But that ideas and the complex manifestations they take on in actual human actions and outcomes, contain degrees of inherent unpredictability that means we have to take a more "open-ended" conception of human events and their intended and unintended consequences.
All that we can intelligently do is appreciate which social institutional orders and arrangements are more adaptive and flexible to foster and adjust to a world of potential change, so mankind may benefit in sundry ways from man's possibilities.
The "wrong" institutions and institutional arrangements can impede this process and its cumulative outcomes. The freer and more open the market order the greater the opportunities to gain from man's creative potentials that show themselves under the right, more market-oriented incentives.
We also must appreciate, North said, that there are formal and informal societal "rules of the game." The formal ones, such as the legal structures and the political institutions have degrees of reformability in the closer "here and now." Regulations restricting foreign trade or domestic competition can be repealed or reduced if there is the political will and sufficient social support.
But accompanying these formal rules of the game are the informal ones of people belief and value systems that define how people see themselves, others, and the social order in which they live.
These informal rules of the game are much less easy to change, modify or transform. They involve what is often referred to as "cultural shifts" and these are far more difficult and time-consuming to transform, and can themselves impede or prevent changes in those more formal social rules.
The latter requires changes in people's "hearts and minds," that does not get transformed over night. The economic educator's task, the conclusion from Douglas North's contribution suggests, is that attention and focus must be on the slow but essential process of changing the ways people view themselves and the social possibilities in which they live.
Among Douglas North's most important works are:
"The Rise of the Western World" (1973); "Structure and Change in Economic History" (1981); "Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance" (1990); and "Understanding the Process of Economic Change" (2005).
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1993.
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