Douglass C. North

Douglass Cecil North (November 5, 1920 – November 23, 2015) was an American economist known for his work in economic history. He was the co-recipient (with Robert William Fogel) of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. In the words of the Nobel Committee, North and Fogel "renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods to explain economic and institutional change." 

Douglass North was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 5, 1920. He moved several times as a child due to his father's work at MetLife. The family lived in Ottawa, Lausanne, New York City, and Wallingford, Connecticut. North was educated at Ashbury College in Ottawa, Ontario, and the Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut. He was accepted at Harvard at the same time his father became the head of MetLife on the west coast, so North opted to attend the University of California, Berkeley. 

During his time at Berkeley, North was a member of the Chi Phi Fraternity. In 1942, he graduated with a B.A. degree in General Curriculum-Humanities. Although his grades amounted to slightly better than a "C" average, he managed to complete a triple major in political science, philosophy, and economics. That same year, he entered the US Merchant Marine Academy, graduated a year later, and went to sea for three years as a deck officer.

A conscientious objector in World War II, North became a navigator in the Merchant Marine, traveling between San Francisco and Australia. During that time, he read economics and picked up his hobby of photography. He taught navigation at the Maritime Service Officers' School in Alameda during the last year of the war. He struggled with the decision of whether to become a photographer or an economist.

North returned to UC Berkeley, where he obtained a Ph.D. degree in economics in 1952. He subsequently began to work as an assistant professor at the University of Washington. North died on November 23, 2015, at his summer home in Benzonia, Michigan, from esophageal cancer at the age of 95. From 1951 to 1956, North was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Washington, then from 1956 to 1960, an associate professor. 

In 1960 North became the Journal of Economic History co-editor, popularizing Cliometrics (New Economic History). From 1960 to 1983, he was a professor of economics at the University of Washington, where he also served as the economics department chair from 1967 to 1979. In 1979 he served as the Peterkin Professor of Political Economy at Rice University, and in 1981–82 as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, before joining the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis in 1983 as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Law and Liberty in the Department of Economics (where he also served as director of the Center for Political Economy from 1984 to 1990). 

He was the Bartlett Burnap Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In 1991, he became the first economic historian to win the John R. Commons Award, which the International Honors Society established for Economics in 1965. North's papers are housed at the Rubenstein Library at Duke University.