American - Economist | November 5, 1920 - November 23, 2015
I would be remiss if I left the impression that my life has been totally preoccupied with scholarly research.
Douglass North
LifeResearchMy LifeImpression
My brother and sister are both older than I am and were born before my father went off to World War I.
FatherI AmWarBrotherSisterBorn
My early work and publications centered around expanding on the analysis of life insurance in my dissertation and its relationship to investment banking.
LifeWorkRelationshipInsurance
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.
LifeFatherMotherSchoolI AmBoy
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.
SchoolWarLawStrongFeelingWant
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.
ChangeMePerformanceDevelopment
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.
LifeSchoolCompetitionCollegeHigh
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.
LifeFatherTimeCollegeInsurance
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.
OpportunityWarMeReadingThree
Our family life was certainly not intellectual.
LifeFamilyIntellectualFamily 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.
WorkLiveWifeResearchEnvironment
My record at the University of California as an undergraduate was mediocre to say the best.
BestSayCaliforniaUniversity
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