by Douglass C. North
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Ideology versus Calculation in History, 2008-04-28
Structure and Change in Economic History is an insightful and informative book. Much of what you find here is standard Comparative Institutional analysis, as developed by Mancur Olson, Ronald Coase, and James Buchanan. North aims at understanding institutions as humanly devised structure within which we all interact. Institutions are constraints that enable us to deal with real problem: free riding, high transaction costs, coordination failures... To some extent we must understand institutions in terms of utilitarian calculations. However, we must not limit our analysis to the utilitarian calculus of welfare economics.
Institutions are founded upon ideology. Ideological change drives institutional change. The aim of ideology is to "energize groups to behave contrary to a simple hedonistic individual calculation of costs" (p53). Ideology is definitely important to understanding institutions. But New Institutional and Public Choice Economists tend to ignore ideology, in favor of explaining institutions strictly in terms of utility maximizing choice.
We can see how ideology plays out with institutions that are relatively insulated from pressure groups and voters. Life tenure for judges might enable them to rule on cases based on their worldviews, rather than narrow utilitarian considerations. We must examine the role of `intellectual entrepreneurs' who develop `contrasting worldviews'. North has the right kind of mix between the issues that economists and other academics explore. Economists are right about the need for understanding human behavior in terms of a utilitarian calculus. However, economists have often erred by ignoring factors like ideology. North makes no such mistakes.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A basic tool for development economics, 2007-05-07
Together with his more recent Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (1990), D.C.North provides here an indispensable framework to reflect on the problems of social transformation that underlie economic growth and development. He proffers no magic wand, but he describes the long processes implied in institution building which no development theoretician or practitioner should ever ignore.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
pls read this for better understanding of the world as it exists now, 2006-11-02
Do you want to know why the USA are rich and powerful and why Russia, for example, can't copy its way ? Why is export of formal institutions impossible in this world without considering ideology, mental structures and so on..
And don't even try to force others to be like you, to eat hamburgers and drive fords. We are different! and it lies beneath - in history.
It's the only positive and constructive idea that appears in ones mind when reading North. Let his theory be week and not scientific enough, let him mix neoclassics with institutional economics and history - this eclectics will do good for you as a killer of brain limits.
peace!
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
 Structure and Change in Economic History, 2004-12-03
This book aims to explain the structure and evolution of institutions. The author, Nobel laureate Douglass North, concludes that the tension between gains from specialization and attendant costs is "the basic source of structure and change in economic history." Institutions arise to exploit the gains from division of labor or to reduce transaction costs. This theory appears to offer considerable economy and power of explanation.
North asserts that, in the prehistoric era, human population increase would lead to declining labor productivity as resources were exhausted. New technologies could increase productivity but, if property rights were nonexclusive, as they must have been in a nomadic hunter-gatherer society, new technologies would simply accelerate resource depletion. Only if a tribe or band could exclude rivals from exploiting the resource, as they could in a settled agricultural society, would the productivity gains from new technology be sustained. The advantage that agriculture offered, then, was the opportunity to establish exclusive communal property rights. This produced what North calls the first economic revolution.
The first economic revolution, occasioned by the rise of agriculture, produced the state, "the most fundamental achievement of the ancient world." The state specialized in providing security, keeping order within societies and protecting them from outside threats, while the complex demands of an agricultural economy (compared to those of a hunter-gatherer economy) required increased specialization throughout the rest of society as well. Over time, new military technologies led to larger states and more representative forms of government as rulers were forced to make concessions to their constituents to compete militarily with other rulers.
The industrial revolution, which North refers to as the second economic revolution, was largely a result of better specified and enforced property rights that raised the private returns to invention and led to an invention "industry." The industrial revolution brought tremendous gains in the standard of living but required new institutions to achieve gains from specialization without losing them to attendant transaction costs.
North notes that transaction costs would be prohibitive without a normative system that encourages compliance with contractual obligations. Accordingly, concurrent with the industrial revolution, we see a concerted effort by elites to inculcate the values of hard work, thrift, and sobriety among the working classes. In fact, North has reflected deeply on the role of ideology in an industrial society. Changes in knowledge and technology affect relative prices and thus affect perceptions of fairness. Differences in occupation or geographic location also give rise to different perceptions of how output should be distributed. "Ideological entrepreneurs" capitalize on these different perceptions. Successful ideologies must provide an explanation of history that plausibly accounts for current conditions. Ideologies must be flexible so that they can attract new adherents and accommodate changed conditions. Most importantly, to effect change, successful ideologies must overcome the free rider problem. Their ability to do so will be inversely related to the legitimacy of existing institutions.
An interesting question asked early on in the book is, why do states persistently fail to establish property rights that would permit high rates of economic growth? He explains that states first maximize returns for the ruler and then, subject to this constraint, try to reduce transaction costs throughout the economy. Where the ruler is an individual or the representative of a small elite group, the interests of rulers will not normally coincide with those of society as a whole.
Structure and Change in Economic History offers considerable insight into fundamental historical forces. It will come as no surprise to those who have read this work that North won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1993 for his use of economic theory and quantitative methods to explain economic and institutional change.
15 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
 Institutions as Panacea, 2002-03-01
In this book North modifies the rationality assumption of neoclassical theory and puts individuals into a more complex framework of decision-making. According to my reading, this new model is characterized by an emphasis on incentive constrains (structures/institutions) and a dynamic process of learning (both individual and collective). But here North runs into a problem with the infamous structure/agency dichotomy. That is, he means to rise above methodological individualism by incorporating a broad, deterministic social "structure" into his analysis -- "by structure I mean those characteristics of a society which we believe to be the basic determinants of performance" (3). However, he also seems to chalk a great deal of explanatory power up to individual leadership, calculation and rationality: the state specifying rules of the game to maximize rents (24) and also: "throughout history, individuals given a choice between a state-however exploitative it might be-and anarchy, have decided for the former" (24). But if there's such a powerful structure, then can individuals really "choose" their fate? How much leeway is there for strategic calculation? On page 32 he seems to say that the masses have no power to choose: "institutional innovation will always come from rulers rather than constituents since the latter would always face the free rider problem". Is North's structure (and institutions) merely an aggregation of the choices of masses of agents, or is it the strategic choices of a few ruling principals and their agents, or is it the evolution of an impersonal body of culture, ideas, law, etc., or is it all three? And if it's all three, then is he trying to incorporate too much into the concept of "institutions", until they become tautological? What CANNOT be an institution under his definition, and if everything is an institution, then how can we formulate testable, falsifiable hypotheses about social change? North defines institutions as "the humanly devised constrains that construct human interaction" (p. 344); or, the rules of the game in a society. Thus, it is clear that North is trying to provide an explanation of the dynamic interaction among many factors, which is always a difficult task. But he is to be commended for modifying neoclassical thought in this provocative new way, potentially opening a path for a whole new research agenda in the social sciences.
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