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| 经济学家日历：道格拉斯·塞西尔·诺斯 |
作者： 发布时间：2007-11-25 15:20:56 来源： 点击数：54
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Douglass Cecil North
(born November 5, 1920)
Douglass C. North – Autobiography
I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts - not because my family had any connection with higher education, but because my father was a manager at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in a nearby town and Cambridge was the nearest hospital - in 1920. In the ensuing years we moved a number of times as a result of my father's business. First Connecticut and then, when he became head of the Metropolitan's Canadian office, Ottawa. Because my mother believed in education broadly construed, we also lived in Europe and I went to school at the Lycée Jacquard in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1929-30. My brother and sister are both older than I am and were born before my father went off to World War I.
I went to elementary school in Ottawa, and then to a private secondary school. When we moved back to the United States in 1933, I went to private schools in New York City and on Long Island, and then completed my high school education at the Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut. While I was there I became deeply interested in photography, and indeed the most noteworthy event in my early life was winning first, third, fourth and seventh prizes in an international competition for college and high school students.
Our family life was certainly not intellectual. My father had not even completed high school when he started as an office boy working for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and I am not sure that my mother completed high school. Nevertheless, she was an exciting person, intelligent, intellectually curious, and she played an important part in my intellectual development. My aunt and uncle were, and in the case of my aunt (Adelaide North) still is, a powerful influence. They introduced me to classical music and my aunt continues to be, to this day, a very special person in my life.
When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco. Because I did not want to be that far from home, I decided to go instead to the University of California at Berkeley. While I was there my life was completely changed by becoming a convinced Marxist and engaging in a variety of student liberal activities. I was opposed to World War II, and indeed on June 22, 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union I suddenly found myself the lone supporter of peace since everybody else had, because of their communist beliefs, shifted over to become supporters of the war. My record at the University of California as an undergraduate was mediocre to say the best. I had only slightly better than a "C" average, although I did have a triple major in political science, philosophy, and economics. I had hoped to go to law school, but the war started, and because of the strong feeling that I did not want to kill anybody, I joined the Merchant Marine when I graduated from Berkeley. We had been to sea only a short time when the Captain called me up on the bridge and asked me if I could learn to navigate since most of the officers had had only rudimentary education, and we needed to get from San Francisco to Australia. I became navigator and enjoyed it very much. We made repeated trips from San Francisco to Australia, and then to the front lines in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I became convinced that I should become an economist. Then the last year of the war I taught celo-navigation at the Maritime Service Officers' School in Alameda, California; I took up photography again and had a difficult decision as to whether to become a photographer or go into economics. In the summer of 1941 I had worked with Dorothea Lange, head of the photographic division of the Farm Security Administration, travelling with and photographing migrants through the central valley of California. Now Dorothea tried to persuade me to become a photographer. Her husband, Paul Taylor, who was in the economics department at the University of California, tried to persuade me to become an economist. He won.
I went back to graduate school with the clear intention that what I wanted to do with my life was to improve societies, and the way to do that was to find out what made economies work the way they did or fail to work. I believed that once we had an understanding of what determined the performance of economies through time, we could then improve their performance. I have never lost sight of that objective.
I cannot say that I learned much formal economics as a graduate student in Berkeley. My most influential professors were Robert Brady; Leo Rogin, a Marxist and a very influential teacher of history of economic thought; and M. M. Knight (Frank Knight's brother) who certainly was agnostic, to say the least, about theory, but who had a wonderful knowledge of the facts and background in economic history. He became my mentor and my thesis advisor at Berkeley. But while I learned by rote most of the theory I was supposed to know, I did not acquire a real understanding of theory. It was not until I got my first job, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and began playing chess with Don Gordon, a brilliant young theorist, that I learned economic theory. In the three years of playing chess every day from noon to two, I may have beaten Don at chess, but he taught me economics; more important he taught me how to reason like an economist, and that skill is still perhaps the most important set of tools that I have acquired.
I had written my dissertation on the history of life insurance in the United States and had had a Social Science Research Council Fellowship to go to the east coast and do the spade work. That turned out to be a very productive year. I not only sat in on Robert Merton's seminars in sociology at Columbia, but also became deeply involved in the Entrepreneurial school of Arthur Cole at Harvard. The result was that Joseph Schumpeter had a strong influence upon me. My early work and publications centered around expanding on the analysis of life insurance in my dissertation and its relationship to investment banking.
I next turned to developing an analytical framework to look at regional economic growth and this led to my first article in the Journal of Political Economy, entitled "Location Theory and Regional Economic Growth". That work eventually led me to developing a staple theory of economic growth.
I was very fortunate that at a meeting of the Economic History Association I come to know Solomon Fabricant, who was then director of research at the National Bureau of Economic Research; and in 1956-57 I was invited to spend the year at the Bureau as a research associate. That was an enormously important year in my life. I not only became acquainted with most of the leading economists who passed through the bureau, but spent one day a week in Baltimore with Simon Kuznets and did the empirical work that led to my early major quantitative study of the balance of payments of the United States from 1790 to 1860.
I married for the first time in 1944. During my graduate training my wife taught school, providing our major source of support. We had three sons, Douglass, Christopher, and Malcolm, born between 1951 and 1957. After the boys were in school my wife became a successful politician in the Washington State legislature.
Between my year at the National Bureau and 1966-67, when I went off to Geneva as a Ford Faculty Fellow, I did my major work in American economic history, which led to my first book, The Economic Growth of the United States from 1790 to 1860. It was a straightforward analysis of how markets work in the context of an export staple model of growth.
By this time (1960) there was a substantial stirring to try to change and transform economic history. The year that I was at NBER, the Bureau and the Economic History Association had the first joint quantitative program on the growth of the American economy, a conference that was held at Williamstown, Massachusetts, in the late spring of 1957. This meeting was really the beginning of the new economic history, but the program coalesced when Jon Hughes and Lance Davis, two former students of mine who had become faculty members at Purdue, called the first conference of economic historians interested in trying to develop and apply economic theory and quantitative methods to history. The first meeting was held in February of 1960. This program was highly successful and the reception that it received amongst economists was certainly enthusiastic. Economics departments very quickly became interested in having new economic historians, or, as we came to call ourselves, cliometricians (Clio being the muse of history). Therefore, as I developed a graduate program jointly with my colleague Morris David Morris at the University of Washington we attracted some of the best students to do work in economic history, and during the 1960s and early 70s the job market was very responsive and our students were easily placed throughout the country.
In 1966-67 I decided that I should switch from American to European economic history, and therefore, when I received the above-mentioned grant to live in Geneva for a year, I decided to re-tool. Re-tooling turned out to change my life radically, since I quickly became convinced that the tools of neo-classical economic theory were not up to the task of explaining the kind of fundamental societal change that had characterized European economies from medieval times onward. We needed new tools, but they simply did not exist. It was in the long search for a framework that would provide new tools of analysis that my interest and concern with the new institutional economics evolved. The result was two initial books, one with Lance Davis, Institutional Change and American Economic Growth, and the other with Robert Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History.
Both books were early tentative attempts to develop some tools of institutional analysis and apply them to economic history. Both were still predicated on neo-classical economic theory, and there were too many loose ends that did not make sense: such as the notion that institutions were efficient (however defined). Perhaps more serious, it was not possible to explain long-run poor economic performance in a neo-classical framework. So I began to explore what was wrong. Individual beliefs were obviously important to the choices people make, and only the extreme myopia of economists prevented them from understanding that ideas, ideologies, and prejudices mattered. Once you recognize that, you are forced to examine the rationality postulate critically.
The long road towards developing a new analytical framework involved taking all of these considerations seriously: to develop a view of institutions that would account for why institutions produced results that in the long run did not manage to produce economic growth; develop a model of political economy in order to be able to handle and explain the underlying source of institutions. Finally, one had to come to grips with why people had the ideologies and ideas that determined the choices they made.
In Structure and Change in Economic History (1981) I abandoned the notion that institutions were efficient and attempted to explain why "inefficient" rules would tend to exist and be perpetuated. This was tied to a very simple and still neo-classical theory of the state which could explain why the state could produce rules that did not encourage economic growth. I was still dissatisfied with our understanding of the political process, and indeed searched for colleagues who were interested in developing political-economic models. This led me to leave the University of Washington in 1983 after being there for 33 years, and to move to Washington University in St. Louis, where there was an exciting group of young political scientists and economists who were attempting to develop new models of political economy. This proved to be a felicitous move. I created the Center in Political Economy, which continues to be a creative research center.
The development of a political-economic framework to explore long-run institutional change occupied me during all of the 1980s and led to the publication of Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance in 1990. In that book I began to puzzle seriously about the rationality postulate. It is clear that we had to have an explanation for why people make the choices they do; why ideologies such as communism or Muslim fundamentalism can shape the choices people make and direct the way economies evolve through long periods of time. One simply cannot get at ideologies without digging deeply into cognitive science in attempting to understand the way in which the mind acquires learning and makes choices. Since 1990, my research has been directed toward dealing with this issue. I still have a long way to go, but I believe that an understanding of how people make choices; under what conditions the rationality postulate is a useful tool; and how individuals make choices under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity are fundamental questions that we must address in order to make further progress in the social sciences.
In 1972 I married again, to Elisabeth Case; she continues to be wife, companion, critic and editor: a partner in the projects and programs that we undertake.
I would be remiss if I left the impression that my life has been totally preoccupied with scholarly research. True, it has been the fundamental focus of my life, but it has been intermingled with a variety of activities that have complemented that central preoccupation and enriched my life. I continue to be a photographer; I have enjoyed fishing and hunting with a close friend; and have owned two ranches, first in northern California and then in the state of Washington. I learned to fly an airplane, and had my own airplane during the 1960s. I have always taken seriously good food and wine. In addition, music has continued to be an important part of my life.
My wife and I now live in the summers in northern Michigan in an environment which is wonderfully conducive to research, and where most of my work in the last 15 years has been done. I work on research all morning. In the afternoons I hike with my dog, play tennis or go swimming. In the evening, as we are only 16 miles from the National Music Camp at Interlochen, we may listen to music two or three nights a week. It is a wonderful place for that mixture of research and leisure which has made my life such a rich experience.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1993, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1994
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
Addendum May 2005
Since receiving the Nobel Prize in 1993 I have continued my research trying to develop an analytical framework that would make more sense out of long-run economic, social and political change. With that objective in mind, I have gone much more deeply into cognitive science and attempted to understand the way in which the mind and brain work and how that relates to the way in which people make choices and the belief systems that they have. Clearly these underlie institutional change and therefore are a necessary prerequisite to being able to develop a theory about institutional change. I have also attempted to integrate political, economic and social theory since, obviously, a useful theory of economic change cannot confine itself purely to economics but must try to integrate the social sciences and integrate them also with cognitive science. The result is a recently published book by Princeton University Press entitled Understanding the Process of Economic Change.
One result of these interests has been to establish jointly with Ronald Coase, who won the Nobel Prize in 1991, the International Society for the New Institutional Economics. Its first meeting was held in 1997 here in St. Louis, and subsequent to that it has become a thriving international organization with meetings all over the world. The new institutional economics has become such a significant addition to the social sciences that I have been asked to elaborate on it all over the world, particularly in China where there is much enthusiasm about the implications of the new institutional economics applied to solving problems of the Chinese political economic future. In 1995 the University of Beijing formally opened a research center in economics at which I gave the opening address. I also have served as adviser in applying the new institutional economics to economic development in Asia and Latin America and in Eastern Europe. One result of all of this was to establish here at Washington University in St. Louis a center for the new institutional social sciences which attempts to integrate, both at the level of teaching and in research, the social sciences.
In addition, because I feel very strongly that we must reorient the social sciences to attempt to confront these issues and to be more oriented toward policy problems, I held a meeting in the fall of 1994 of leading social scientists from political science, economics, and sociology to attempt to plan how the social sciences should evolve over time. This initial meeting was successful and successive meetings are planned for future years and at other universities to attempt to build on this development.
And finally, as a result of being asked to participate in the Copenhagen Consensus, which was an attempt to get a number of economists to confront leading issues around the world, I participated in what turned out to be a very interesting attempt to explore and resolve problems as varied as HIV and aids, malnutrition, clean water, etc., to come up with policy recommendations that would move towards solving such problems. I continue to be involved in all of those things at this time.
“新制度经济学”的创始人之一
第二十五届获奖者道格拉斯·诺斯——“新制度经济学”的创始人之一
作为“新制度经济学”创始人之一，诺斯在多部论著中论证了包括产权在内的制度的作用。诺斯认为，新的制度是在社会群体觉察到有可能获得在现行制度条件下实现不了的利润时出现的。假如外部因素是容许收入增加的，而制度因素则说“不”的话，那么，新的制度安排就很可能发展起来。
——1993年瑞典皇家科学院贺辞
道格拉斯·诺斯（Douglass North）
诺斯，1920年出生于美国马萨诸萨州坎布里奇市，1942年获得加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校学士学位，1952年获得博士学位。1946年开始在伯克利分校任教；并于1950年成为华盛顿大学的教授；1961年担任华盛顿大学研究所的所长。他1979年任教于赖斯大学；1981年到1982年任教于剑桥大学；1982年重新回到华盛顿大学，现任该大学经济系卢斯讲座教授。诺斯于1960～1966年任《经济史杂志》副主编，1972年担任美国经济史学协会会长；1966～1986年任国民经济研究局董事会董事；1968年、1971年、1978年经济研究所理事会理事；1972～1973年任东方经济协会会长；1973年任巴黎高级研究实验学院历史研究中心客座副主任；1975～1976年任西方经济协会会长；1987～1988年任斯坦福大学行为科学高级研究中心客座研究员。
诺斯是新经济史的先驱者、开拓者和抗议者。诺斯“始终如一地站在近些年来席卷经济史学界的新浪潮的最前沿，这股浪潮试图将新古典经济学应用于悬而未决的经济史问题”（马克·布劳格语）。经过多年的苦心经营，诺斯所在的华盛顿大学已经变成了新经济史学派、新制度学派和新政治学派的学术中心。
主要学术贡献
诺斯的主要贡献在于研究方法上的创新，即用古典经济学的方法研究新的对象。也就是说，运用新古典经济学和经济计量学来研究经济史问题。在其早期对远洋运输和美国国际收支所做的研究中，他与福格尔所代表的新经济史学派并驾齐驱，将新古典生产理论与经济史中所发现的数据结合起来。这种新的方法推动经济史的研究发生了革命性的变化。诺斯并不满足于此，他又利用产权理论来解释美国历史中制度变革对经济绩效的影响。
诺斯的早期著作，诸如《美国从1790年至1860年的经济增长》、《美国过去的增长与福利：新经济史》等等，对此做了充分的反映。从二十世纪八十年代开始，诺斯又运用新制度经济学派的产权理论，分析西方世界最近两个世纪中工业化的更为一般的理论。其目的是探讨西方世界经济增长的原因、经济增长与制度变迁的内在联系、产权制度与经济发展的互动趋势、经济发展对制度的内在要求。诺斯这一方面的著作主要有《西方世界的兴起》、《制度变革与美国经济绩效》等等。进入二十世纪90年代以后，诺斯开始总结他30多年研究经济史的经验，从中提炼出一些对经济学尤其是对新制度经济学有重要贡献的理论。在这一方面他的著作主要有《制度、制度绩效与经济增长》。
概括起来说，诺斯对经济学的贡献主要包括三个方面：第一，用制度经济学的方法来解释历史上的经济增长；第二，作为新制度经济学的开创者之一，诺斯重新论证了包括产权制度在内的制度的作用；第三，作为经济学家的诺斯将新古典经济学中所没有涉及的内容——制度，作为内生变量运用到经济研究中去，特别是将产权制度、意识形态、国家、伦理道德等作为经济演进和经济发展的变量，极大地发展了制度变迁理论。
产权理论、国家理论和意识形态理论是诺斯的制度变迁理论的三大基石。诺斯通过对西方市场经济演变史的审视与分析，升华出制度变迁理论的思想，并以三大理论基石来构建他的分析框架。如他所述，“我研究的重点放在制度理论上，这一理论的基石是：描述一个体制中激励个人和集团的产权理论；界定实施产权的国家理论；影响人们对‘客观’存在的变化不同反应的意识形态理论，这种理论解释为何人们对现实有不同的理解。”值得提出的是，诺斯在阐明上述分析框架的过程中，始终以成本—收益为分析工具，论证产权结构选择的合理性、国家存在的必要性以及意识形态的重要性；而这种分析使得诺斯的制度变迁理论具有巨大的说服力。
产权理论
产权理论是诺斯制度变迁理论的第一大理论支柱。诺斯认为有效率的产权对经济增长起着十分重要的作用。他曾提到“增长比停滞或萧条更为罕见这一事实表明，‘有效率’的产权在历史中并不常见”。很显然，经济能否增长往往受到有无效率的产权的影响。有效率的产权之所以对经济增长起着促进的作用，因为一方面产权的基本功能与资源配置的效率相关，另一方面有效率的产权使经济系统具有激励机制。这种机制的激励作用体现在以下三个方面：降低或减少费用；人们的预期收益得到保证；从整个社会来说，个人的投资收益充分接近于社会收益（在产权行使成本为0时，充分界定的产权使得个人的投资收益等于社会收益）。所以诺斯认为产权的界定、调整、变革、保护是必要的。
国家理论
国家理论是诺斯制度变迁理论的第二大理论支柱。诺斯对国家的看法集中体现在这一悖论中：“国家的存在是经济增长的关键，然而国家又是人为经济衰退的根源”。对这一悖论的论证，诺斯是从国家与产权的关系上展开的。如果国家能够界定一套产权，提供一个经济地使用资源的框架，它就能促进全社会福利增加，推动经济增长，这就是国家契约论；如果国家界定一套产权，仅使权力集团的收益最大化，就不能实现整个社会经济的发展，而会造成人为的经济衰退，这就是国家掠夺论。那么，对国家存在的解释到底是契约论还是掠夺论呢？诺斯认为“尽管契约论解释了最初签订契约的得利，但未说明不同利益成员的利益最大化行为，而掠夺论忽略了契约最初签订的得利而着眼于掌握国家控制权的人从其选民中榨取租金”，所以他把不全面的两种理论统一起来，用“暴力潜能”论解释国家的存在。
为什么国家对经济发展起着双重作用呢？诺斯认为国家作为“经济人”提供服务有两个基本的目的：一是界定形成产权结构的竞争与合作的基本规则（即在要素和产品市场上界定所有制结构），这能使统治者的租金最大化；二是在第一目的的框架中降低交易费用以使社会产出最大，从而使国家税收增加。事实上，这两个目的是不一致的。第一个目的实质上指国家企图确立一套基本规则，以保证统治者收入最大化，但国家为使自己的“垄断租金”最大化，并不关心交易费用的降低和有效率的制度的创新，从而会阻碍经济的增长。第二个目的是界定一套使社会产出最大化且完全有效率的产权以推动经济增长。基于上述两个目的的不一致性，诺斯进一步认为国家在竞争约束与交易约束下会界定一套有利于统治集团而无效率的产权结构。
另外，诺斯认为国家是一种不可控的、神秘的、超经济的力量，因而他在《经济史中的结构与变迁》中并没有解释国家存在的原因，而强调了国家的暴力。他以为“理解国家的关键在于为实行对资源的控制而尽可能地利用暴力”。
意识形态理论
意识形态理论是诺斯制度变迁的第三大理论支柱。诺斯认为只有意识形态理论才能说明如何克服经济人的机会主义行为如“搭便车”现象，才能进一步解释制度的变迁。在诺斯的制度变迁论中，国家理论说明产权是由国家界定的，而产权理论表明一个国家的经济绩效取决于产权的有效性。但是上述两大理论并没有成功解释如何克服“搭便车”的问题，也许产权的无效率性及其不完全性，可以部分地解释“搭便车”等经济行为的存在，但是产权的充分界定及行使，经济行为的监督与考核是要花费成本的。在成本小于收益的情况下，有效率且完全的产权也许勉强克服了这种经济行为，然而在成本大于收益的情况下，单靠有效率且完全的产权无济于事。总之，上述两大理论无法彻底克服机会主义行为，从而无法完全阐明制度变迁。因此，制度变迁的研究需要一种意识形态理论。诺斯认为意识形态是一种行为方式，这种方式通过提供给人们一种“世界观”而使行为决策更为经济，使人的经济行为受一定的习惯、准则和行为规范等的协调而更加公正、合理并且符合公正的评价。当然这种意识形态不可避免地与个人在观察世界时对公正所持的道德、伦理评价相互交织在一起，一旦人们的经验与其思想不相符合时，人们会改变其意识观念，这时意识形态就会成为一个不稳定的社会因素。
著作点击
诺斯的主要著作有：
《1790—1860年的美国经济增长》（1961）；
《美国过去的增长与福利：新经济史》（1966）；
《制度变化与美国的经济增长》（与戴维斯合著，1971）；
《西方世界的兴起：新经济史》（与托马斯合著，1973）；
《经济史中的结构与变迁》。
诺斯的主要论文有：《经济史》、《1600—1850年海洋运输生产率的变化的原由》、《西方世界成长的经济理论》、《第一次经济革命》、《结构与绩效：经济史的任务》。
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