Wabash College invites you to hear Nobel Laureate Douglass C. North present the 2006 Benjamin A. Rogge Memorial Lecture. Dr. North’s lecture, "The Natural State or Why Effective Economic Reform is so Difficult to Achieve," will be presented on Friday, October 6 at 5:00 p.m. in Salter Hall in the Fine Arts Center.
North is the Spencer T. Olin Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He was co-recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1993.
North has published groundbreaking work in economic history and theory, including The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History, Structure and Change in Economic History and Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. North is recognized as one of the founders of the "new institutional economics," and has done important work on the connection of the cognitive sciences to economic theory.
North’s appointment at Washington University follows 32 years at the University of Washington at Seattle, where he was director of the Institute for Economic Research for five years and chairman for 12 years. He was the Peterkin Professor of Political Economics at Rice University in the fall of 1979, Pitt Professor at Cambridge University in England in 1981–82, and a visiting fellow of the center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 1987–88. He was editor of the Journal of Economic History for five years and president of the Economic History Association in 1972. He was a 20-year member of the Board of Directors of the National Bureau of Economic Research until 1986.
North received his B.A. in 1942 and his Ph.D. in 1952 from the University of California at Berkeley. He also served as a U.S. Merchant Marine from 1942 to 1946 and was an instructor in celo-navigation from 1944 to 1946.
In addition to his evening lecture, North will give a lunch time talk on "Cognitive Foundations of Social Science" at 1:10 p.m. in Baxter Hall, room 114.
North’s lecture is free and open to the public. This annual event honors the late Wabash College professor of economics, Benjamin Rogge.
You can read more about Douglass North at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1993/north-autobio.html