Quotes by Douglass North
“The inability of societies to develop effective, low-cost enforcement of contracts is the most important source of both historical stagnation and contemporary underdevelopment in the Third World.”— Douglass North
“Institutions are the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, are the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.”— Douglass North
“Institutions form the incentive structure of a society, and the political and economic institutions, in consequence, are the underlying determinant of economic performance.”— Douglass North
“Ideologies are the shared framework of mental models that groups of individuals possess that provide both an interpretation of the environment and a prescription as to how that environment should be structured.”— Douglass North
“Transaction costs are a part of the costs of production. They are the costs of defining and enforcing property rights.”— Douglass North
“The central issue of economic history and of economic development is to account for the evolution of political and economic institutions that create an economic environment that induces increasing productivity.”— Douglass North
“History matters. It matters not just because we can learn from the past, but because the present and the future are connected to the past by the continuity of a society's institutions.”— Douglass North
“The formal rules can be changed overnight... but the informal constraints embedded in customs, traditions, and codes of conduct are much more impervious to deliberate policies.”— Douglass North