Structure and Change in Economic History

by Douglass C. North

Book Overview

At the core of Professor North's investigation is the question of property rights, the arrangements individuals and groups have made through history to deal with the fundamental economic problem of scarce resources.

In six theoretical chapters, Professor North examines the structure of economic systems, outlines an economic theory of the state and the ideologies that undergird various modes of economic organization, and then explores the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 039395241X
• ISBN13: 9780393952414
• Release Date: October 1982
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Ideology versus Calculation in History

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.

Structure and Change in Economic History

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 explanati

theory covering eight millenia of economic history

Professor North's work is divided into two parts. The first briefly outlines a theory of structural change of institutions through time. North argues that the most interesting aspects of economic history involve assumptions that standard, neoclassical economic theory holds contant. In particular, North argues that "The physiography and resources of the regions together with the state of military technology played decisive roles in determining the size and characteristics of the state and in shaping the forms of economic organization" (pg. 64), and that those forms overcome shirking, known as the Free Rider Problem, through the elaboration of a dominant ideology. It is just such considerations that neoclassical theory cannot account for in its model of the utilitarian actor and yet which are so vital in understanding the essential elements of economic history (rather than economics) - structure and change.The second part applies the ideas of the first to a few thousand years of human history. At least that is the aim. It is actually little more than a brief recounting of major events in world, particularly Western history. North starts with the so-called First Economic Revolution; that is, mankind's switch from a primarily hunter/gatherer existence to one based mostly on agriculture. He then moves through the decline of the ancient world, spending most all of his time on the fall of the Roman Empire. From there he covers the rise of western Europe and then the American economy at the turn of the last century.It is this second part that is the book's weakest link. North should either have spent more time discussing how his theory relates to the event he surveys or let the reader apply the theory on her own and left the historical essays out entirely. As they stand, they are little more than brief reviews in "benchmark" and tired historical events. It would have been interesting, for instance, to see how Roman economic institutions and its ideology of stoicism compared with the Ch'in dynasty and confucianism, or of the role that "physiography" - a word used but never discussed - played in the differing development of each. Here North seems much less willing to speculate.His theory also leaves a little to be desired. By explaining innovation merely as a result of the development of communal, and then personal property rights, he can make the scientist and historian of science shudder. He argues for the central role of structure in forging economic systems and the dominant order, but seems merely to assume that no structure existed in early hunter/gatherer bands - that they were models of egalitarianism. Such ideas run counter to a lot of accumulating evidence that man, like all social mammals, has a basic social structure "hardwired" in us. It is not clear how such knowledge would effect the formation of early "states" as North describes them.But all criticisms aside, the book is well-written and the discussions, if they cannot lay all controversy to

A must read.... I suppose....

Although this is an important book from the 1993 Nobel Prizewinner in Economics, and a text that capably and fully illustrates what it sets out to do at its outset, I hesitate to recommend it universally for reasons that aren't fully clear to me..... Certainly, this is a book that should be read by students of economic histroy and political economy. It illustrates how social changes (i.e. changes in property rights) lead to seemingly unrelated changes across the whole of society. It is well-written. Perhaps you should buy this book....

Must Read

A must read for anyone interested in economics and economic history. This book gives a sophisticated and neccessary background that will give an understanding as to why the world is the way it is today.