La evolución de las economías en el transcurso del tiempo

Nuevos enfoques en la historia económica de España y de América Latina. Homenaje a Robert W. Fogel y Douglas C. North, Premios Nobel de Economía 1993Editada en la Universidad Carlos IIIPublicad

Why Some Countries Are Rich and Some Are Poor

Professor North describes the difficulties encountered in promoting development: although economists are well aware of the conditions that promote productivity and creativity, only formal rules can be easily changed. Formal rules are but one part of a set of institutions in which people operate: informal norms of behavior and the enforcement mechanisms for both formal and informal rules have profound effects on human thought and activity. Economists have traditionally endeavored to impose simplistic sets of formal rules on developing countries; this model is largely ineffective because it ignores the role of culture and beliefs in shaping behavior. The difficult but effective alternative requires study of a society\u27s culture to understand ways in which the formal rules may be changed—consistent with the culture and belief system—to encourage productive and creative activity

A Conceptual 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 paper 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.

Understanding Judicial Decision-Making: The Importance of Constraints on Non-Rational Deliberations

All of social science is based on the assumption that people act rationally, in a logical, unemotional fashion. This is true for all disciplines in social science, including both economics and law. Neoclassical price theory assumes that producers and consumers are rational actors, while the reasonable person in law is the rational cousin to the economic actor. New institutional economists were among the first scholars to examine economic issues by modifying rational choice theory. Today, a large and growing body of scholarship exhibits a willingness to modify the rationality assumption by using cognitive science, behavioral psychology, and experimental economics. This Essay shares that perspective. In the Essay, we reexamine the way judges make decisions by using contemporary theories from cognitive science and concepts from the new institutional economics

Limited access orders in the developing world :a new approach to the problems of development

The upper-income, advanced industrial countries of the world today all have market economies with open competition, competitive multi-party democratic political systems, and a secure government monopoly over violence. Such open access orders, however, are not the only norm and equilibrium type of society. The middle and low-income developing countries today, like all countries before about 1800, can be understood as limited access orders that maintain their equilibrium in a fundamentally different way. In limited access orders, the state does not have a secure monopoly on violence, and society organizes itself to control violence among the elite factions. A common feature of limited access orders is that political elites divide up control of the economy, each getting some share of the rents. Since outbreaks of violence reduce the rents, the elite factions have incentives to be peaceable most of the time. Adequate stability of the rents and thus of the social order requires limiting access and competition-hence a social order with a fundamentally different logic than the open access order. This paper lays out such a framework and explores some of its implications for the problems of development today.Corporate Law,Labor Policies,Public Sector Corruption&Anticorruption Measures,E-Business,Disability

Learning, Institutions, and Economic Performance

T he greatest challenge for the social sciences is to explain change-or more specifically, social, political, economic, and organizational change. 1 The starting point must be an account of human learning, which is the fundamental prerequisite for explaining such change. The ability to learn is the main reason for the observed plasticity of human behavior, and the interaction of learning individuals gives rise to change in society, polity, economy, and organizations. Because learning is the main object of inquiry in cognitive science, only a dogmatic attitude would prevent social scientists interested in phenomena related to change from paying appropriate attention to its findings. The revolution over the past decades in cognitive science has produced valuable insights regarding the processes of individual learning across different types of environments. This is the main reason why cognitive science is not merely of peripheral importance for social scientists, but should be the starting point for any serious discussion of societal change. In this article, we explore the nature of individual learning and then proceed with an examination of collective learning and with a discussion of the emergence of institutions. We then provide a link between learning and overall economic performance and, in the end, examine the issue of path dependence. Individual Learning Research in cognitive science during the past decades has deepened our knowledge of the relationships among brain, mind, and behavior. In particular, work in the approaches known as "cognitive neuroscience" has advanced our understanding of how brain structures are linked to mental phenomena and observable behavior. 2 The cognitive architecture of Homo sapiens being the product of a long evolutionary process, a major issue that confronts us is the interplay between the genetic structure that has evolved in response to the evolving human environment and the cultural conditions that are a consequence of the institutional framework deliberately created by humans to order their environment. Because cognitive science is a very young discipline, there are, not surprisingly, a number of competing explanations for perception, learning, memory, and attention; even more controversy surrounds overall explanations of the nature of the cognitive processes and the interplay between mind and brain. In order to usefully apply cognitive science to political science, economics, and other social sciences, it is important to remember the analytical focus of the explanatory enterprise. For our purpose-coming to grips with the issue of societal change-we want to use theory that is sufficiently analytic to provide the following: • an empirically testable account of individual learning. • a satisfactory account of choice processes. • a foundation for explaining the processes of social learning, since the ultimate phenomena of interest are political change and economic outcomes. In light of these criteria, we need not engage certain questions debated in cognitive science-for example, concept formation, which involves complicated interaction among genetics, neuroembryology, cellular mechanisms, maturation By C. Mantzavinos, Douglass C. North, and Syed Shariq In this article, we provide a broad overview of the interplay among cognition, belief systems, and institutions, and how they affect economic performance. We argue that a deeper understanding of institutions' emergence, their working properties, and their effect on economic and political outcomes should begin from an analysis of cognitive processes. We explore the nature of individual and collective learning, stressing that the issue is not whether agents are perfectly or boundedly rational, but rather how human beings actually reason and choose, individually and in collective settings. We then tie the processes of learning to institutional analysis, providing arguments in favor of what can be characterized as "cognitive institutionalism." Besides, we show that a full treatment of the phenomenon of path dependence should start at the cognitive level, proceed at the institutional level, and culminate at the economic level. C

Aprendizaje, instituciones, y desempeño económico

En este artículo ofrecemos una visión amplia de la interacción entre cognición, sistemas de creencias e instituciones, y de la manera cómo estos afectan el desempeño económico. Argumentamos que una comprensión más profunda del surgimiento, las propiedades operativas y los efectos de las instituciones en los resultados económicos y políticos debería comenzar por el análisis de procesos cognitivos. Exploramos la naturaleza del aprendizaje individual y colectivo, haciendo énfasis en que el asunto no es si los agentes son perfecta o limitadamente racionales, sino cómo los seres humanos en realidad razonan y eligen de forma individual o colectiva. Luego atamos el proceso de aprendizaje con el análisis institucional, ofreciendo argumentos a favor de lo que se puede caracterizar como "institucionalismo cognitivo". Además, mostramos que un tratamiento completo del fenómeno de sendero-dependencia debe comenzar en el nivel cognitivo, pasar por el nivel institucional, y culminar en el nivel económico.Incluye referencias bibliográficas (páginas 31-34

Cliometrics and the Nobel

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . American Economic Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Economic Perspectives. http://www.jstor.org Given the large domain of economic history, it should not be surprisin