Book Discussion: A Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History

Douglas C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry Weingast will present their new book A Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History.

Neither economics nor political science can explain the process of modern social development. The fact that developed societies always have developed economies and developed polities suggests that the connection between economics and politics must be a fundamental part of the development process. This book develops an integrated theory of economics and politics. We show how, beginning 10,000 years ago, limited access social orders developed that were able to control violence, provide order, and allow greater production through specialization and exchange. Limited access orders provide order by using the political system to limit economic entry to create rents, and then using the rents to stabilize the political system and limit violence. We call this type of political economy arrangement a natural state. It appears to be the natural way that human societies are organized, even in most of the contemporary world. In contrast, a handful of developed societies have developed open access social orders. In these societies, open access and entry into economic and political organizations sustains economic and political competition. Social order is sustained by competition rather than rent-creation. The key to understanding modern social development is understanding the transition from limited to open access social orders, which only a handful of countries have managed since WWII.

About the speakers:

Douglas C. North received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1993 "for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change". Douglas C. North was installed as the Spencer T. Olin Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in Saint Louis in October 1996 and is the Hoover Institution's Bartlett Burnap Senior Fellow. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was elected a fellow of the British Academy in July 1996. He is the author of more than fifty articles and ten books. His current research activities include research on property rights, transaction costs, economic organization in history, a theory of the state, the free rider problem, ideology, growth of government, economic and social change, and a theory of institutional change.

North received his B.A. in 1942 and his Ph.D. in 1952 from the University of California at Berkeley.

John J. Wallis is a Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, where he has taught since 1983. His field of specialization is economic history, and his major areas of interest are state and local government finances, the New Deal, the 1830s, and explaining institutional change. His current research focuses on understanding early American government and the critical decade of the 1830s. Wallis has authored dozens of academic journal articles and book chapters.

Wallis received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Washington in 1981.

Barry R. Weingast is the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University; where he served as department chair from 1996 to 2001. He is also a professor of economics, by courtesy, at the university and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Weingast is an expert in political economy and public policy, the political foundation of markets and economic reform, U.S. politics, and regulation. His current research focuses on the political determinants of public policymaking and the political foundations of markets and democracy. Weingast is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He co-authored Analytic Narratives (1998, Princeton) and has numerous academic publications.

Weingast received his Ph.D. in economics from the California Institute of Technology in 1978.