Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Princeton Economic History of the Western World) |
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You Are Here: Home > History Books > Iceland History > Item 124
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Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
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by Douglass C. North
Sales Rank: 145006
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List Price: $37.95
$30.36
At Amazon
on 11-27-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 208 pages
Published by: Princeton University PressEdition: Revised Edition January 3, 2005
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0691118051
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0691118055
Book Dimensions:
9.3 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
Weighs: 15.2 ounces
Product Review
Just as Douglass North's earlier classic, Institutions and Institutional Change, ushered in the revolution in understanding institutions that dominated the nineties, his new book, Understanding the Process of Economic Change, seeks an equally revolutionary change. North now integrates the cognitive component into this analysis: how the mind works, how we form beliefs and understandings about the world, and how societies solve--or fail to solve--the problems they face. This book is vintage North.
(Barry Weingast, Professor of Political Science, Stanford University )
Product Description
In this landmark work, a Nobel Prize-winning economist develops a new way of understanding the process by which economies change. Douglass North inspired a revolution in economic history a generation ago by demonstrating that economic performance is determined largely by the kind and quality of institutions that support markets. As he showed in two now classic books that inspired the New Institutional Economics (today a subfield of economics), property rights and transaction costs are fundamental determinants. Here, North explains how different societies arrive at the institutional infrastructure that greatly determines their economic trajectories.
North argues that economic change depends largely on "adaptive efficiency," a society's effectiveness in creating institutions that are productive, stable, fair, and broadly accepted--and, importantly, flexible enough to be changed or replaced in response to political and economic feedback. While adhering to his earlier definition of institutions as the formal and informal rules that constrain human economic behavior, he extends his analysis to explore the deeper determinants of how these rules evolve and how economies change. Drawing on recent work by psychologists, he identifies intentionality as the crucial variable and proceeds to demonstrate how intentionality emerges as the product of social learning and how it then shapes the economy's institutional foundations and thus its capacity to adapt to changing circumstances.
Understanding the Process of Economic Change accounts not only for past institutional change but also for the diverse performance of present-day economies. This major work is therefore also an essential guide to improving the performance of developing countries.
Reader Reviews
The book's main conjecture can probably be best described backwards: at the end of a number of steps, the political and economic outcomes may be observed. These outcomes are the result of the behavior of a number of relevant actors. Their incentives are structured by the prevailing institutions, which, in North's understanding, consist of formal rules, informal norms, and their enforcement characteristics. Institutions themselves, however, are not exogenously given; they are created by humans who act intentionally. North argues that institutions are created based on the relevant actors' beliefs. If the results of the institutions people create are not as expected, people will update their beliefs--they will learn--and institutional change will continue endlessly. To understand the process of institutional change, then, one must understand how beliefs come into being, receive updating, and form the basis of human action. Such understanding is North's current goal.... North tries to deal with the question by delving into cognitive science. To understand how beliefs are formed and how humans learn, he asserts, we must first understand better how our brains work. Thus, he enters territory where, owing to the academic division of labor, economists are amateurs. However, rather than seriously engaging the relevant issues, he barely scratches the surface. Far from familiarizing the reader with the relevant issues by a thorough survey of recent discussions in cognitive science, he barely mentions two or three competing standpoints and then ends the chapter.... In sum, at the outset of my reading of this book, I hoped to find further substantial progress in the new institutional economics. While reading it, however, I realized that it lacked the rigor of the same author's previous books in this field of research. Instead of offering intriguing new arguments, North repeats questions without offering any real answers.
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Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
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Price: $30.36
Updated on 11-27-2008.
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