Sad news today arrives, as we hear that Douglass North has passed away, living only just longer than his two great compatriots in Cliometrics (Robert Fogel) and New Institutional Economics (Ronald Coase). There will be many lovely pieces today, I’m sure, on North’s qualitative and empirical exploration of the rise of institutions as solutions to agency and transaction cost problems, a series of ideas that continues to be enormously influential. No economist today denies the importance of institutions. If economics is the study of the aggregation of rational choice under constraints, as it is sometimes thought to be, then North focused our mind on the origin of the constraints rather the choice or its aggregation. Why do states develop? Why do guilds, and trade laws, and merchant organizations, and courts, appear, and when? How does organizational persistence negatively affect the economy over time, a question pursued…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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