Douglass C. North

While at the University of Washington, in Seattle, where he taught for 33 years, Professor North helped found a branch of inquiry called cliometrics, named for the muse of history, Clio, after he and others had concluded that traditional market-oriented economics faltered in measuring some aspects of economic performance quantitatively. His work was recognized in 1993 with a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which he shared with Robert W. Fogel, who did similar work independently. (Professor Fogel died in 2013.) Douglass Cecil North was born on Nov. 5, 1920, in Cambridge, Mass., and though he grew up in the shadow of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there was little in his background to suggest that he would become a renowned economics historian. His father, he said, had left high school to work for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company as an office boy, and Professor North did not know if his mother had finished secondary school. He himself had been an indifferent student, making only “slightly better than a C average,” he said, as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became an avowed Marxist and a radical activist who did little classwork. He earned straight A’s at Berkeley and landed a job at the University of Washington, where he formed a pivotal friendship with Donald Gordon, a colleague and daily chess opponent. In 1944 Professor North married Lois Hiester, with whom he had three sons. She became a prominent member of the Washington State Legislature. The marriage ended in divorce, and in 1972 he married Elisabeth W. Case, who survives him. Other survivors include his sons, Douglass, Christopher and Malcolm; a half sister, Sheila; and four grandchildren. He also had a home in St. Louis. After officially retiring from Washington University, Professor North continued to teach classes there and at Stanford University into his early 90s.