w/ Douglass C. North

(from left) Douglass C. North, 1993 Prize in Economics; Third Dacanay, professor at UP Baguio; Laarni Escresa, graduate student of University of Bologna (Picture taken during the Beijing Ronald Coase Workshop on Institutional Analysis)

Sino ba sya?

Excerpts from Douglass C. North's autobiography (bold text, mine)...

... Our family life was certainly not intellectual...

... 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...

... 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...

... 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.

For his full autobiography, check
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1993/north-autobio.html

For his prize lecture
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1993/north-lecture.html