scholarly journals Cognitive rules, institutions, and economic growth: Douglass North and beyond

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
AVNER GREIF ◽  
JOEL MOKYR
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Douglass North

AbstractDouglass North's writing on institutional change recognized from the very start that such change depends on cognition and beliefs. Yet, although he focused on individual beliefs, we argue in this paper that such beliefs are social constructs. We suggest that institutions – rules, expectations, and norms – are based on shared cognitive rules. Cognitive rules are social constructs that convey information that distills and summarizes society's beliefs and experience. These rules have to be self-enforcing and self-confirming, but they do not have to be ‘correct’. We describe the characteristics of such rules in the context of a market for ideas, and illustrate their importance in two developments central to the growth of modern economies: the rise of the modern state with its legitimacy based on consent, and the rise of modern science-based technology that was the product of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.

scholarly journals From a Confucian Literati to a Military General: Li Hung Chang’s Views of Western Technology (1885-1896)

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 155
Author(s):  
Haixia Wang
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Change ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
State Power ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Western Science ◽  
Historical Time

<p class="1Body">This paper focuses on Li Hung Chang (1823-1901)’s visit to England and America in 1896, to rethink and revaluate the importat role Li played at that historical time. Li Hung Chang toured Europe and America in 1896 as an imperial envoy of the first rank. Although some aspects of Li’s career and evaluation have been given monographic treatment, there is yet little study on his comments on his attitudes toward Western science and technology. This paper augues that if modernization is a matter of modern state power as an army, navy, or diplomatic corps, then Li was certainly a modernizer. But if modernization is a deeper process of organizational and institutional change, Li was not a determined modernizer. In fact, Li relied heavily on patronage even when he could exercise legitimate political power, in order to adovocate Self-Strengthening Movement.</p>

The structure and changes of China’s land system

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 471-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liu Shouying
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Structural Characteristics ◽  
Institutional Arrangements ◽  
Reform Process ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Past ◽  
Land System ◽  
Rapid Economic Growth

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the structure and changes of China’s land system. To achieve this aim, the paper is divided into four parts. The first part gives a brief introduction to the structural characteristics of the Chinese land institutional arrangements; the second part analyzes the reform process of the land system in the past 40 years and its path of change; the third part engages the discussion about the historic contribution made by the land institutional change to rapid economic growth and structural changes; and the final part is conclusion and some policy implications. Design/methodology/approach After 40 years of reforms and opening up, China has not only created a growth miracle unparalleled for any major country in human history, but also transformed itself from a rural to an urban society. Behind this great transformation is a systemic reform in land institutions. Rural land institutions went from collectively owned to household responsibility system, thereby protecting farmers’ land rights. This process resulted in long-term sustainable growth in China’s agriculture, a massive rural-urban migration and a historical agricultural transformation. The conversion of agricultural land to non-agricultural uses and the introduction of market mechanisms made land a policy tool in driving high economic growth, industrialization and urbanization. Findings Research shows that the role of land and its relationship with the economy will inevitably change as China’s economy enters a new stage of medium-to-high speed growth. With economic restructuring, low-cost industrial land will be less effective. Urbanization is also shifting from rapid expansion to endogenous growth so that returns on land capitalization will decrease and risks will increase. Therefore, China must abandon land-dependent growth model through deepening land reforms and adapt a new pattern of economic development. Originality/value This paper gives a brief introduction to the structural characteristics of the Chinese land institutional arrangements, analyzes the reform process of the land system in the past 40 years and its path of change, and evaluates the historic contribution made by the land institutional change to rapid economic growth and structural changes.

Architectural Criticism, Science, and Visual Eloquence: Teofilo Gallaccini in Seventeenth-Century Siena

1999 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alina A. Payne
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
Architectural Theory ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Science And Engineering ◽  
Architectural Discourse ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Textual Culture

This article examines the transition from a mimetic conception of architecture as proposed by the great treatise writers of the Renaissance, to the modern, science- and engineering-oriented one that began to supplant it in the eighteenth century. The focus of the investigation is the textual culture of Italian Baroque theory and its vehicle, the till now largely unknown corpus of the Sienese scientist Teofilo Gallaccini. It is argued that alongside the traditional path of architectural theory produced by architects, which evolved in the grooves set in the Vitruvian Renaissance, there existed a parallel path driven by scientists. Absorbing the imitatio practices of visual artists into their own inquiries, scientists provided other outlets for their use and in so doing also provided other directions for architectural discourse. By locating Gallaccini's work in the scientific and architectural culture of his own time, and by exploring its appeal to exponents of the Enlightenment who held widely divergent views on the means of achieving architectural reform, this article argues that-far from proceeding by watersheds and paradigm revolutions, as modernist history writing has held-modern theory owes much to both the scientific and mimetic approaches that not only co-existed but also intertwined in the Baroque.

Institutional Change and American Economic Growth

1974 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 909-921
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Fusfeld ◽  
Charles H. Hession ◽  
Dudley Dillard ◽  
Don Kanel
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Institutional Change

The Recursive Argument Method of Medieval Science

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher I. Beckwith
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Recursive Method ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Medieval Science ◽  
Descriptive Term ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Traditional Term

This chapter examines the recursive argument method of medieval science. The distinctive argument method used in scientific literature from the High Middle Ages to the Enlightenment was the “scientific method” until the scientific revolution. It is traditionally known in earlier scholarly literature as the “scholastic method” or quaestiones disputatae “disputed questions” method. Unfortunately, because of increasing scholarly confusion about the origins and meaning of the traditional term “scholastic method,” and even of the term quaestiones disputatae, it has been necessary to adopt a purely descriptive term, namely recursive argument method, also called recursive method or recursive argument. Many medieval scholars who wrote works using the recursive argument method also wrote treatises. The chapter compares the recursive argument with the treatise and dialogue argument structures and considers diffrent types of formal recursion.

Institutional Change and Economic Growth in East Asia after the Asian Financial Crisis, 1997-98

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-51
Author(s):  
Kee Hoon Chung
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Financial Crisis ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Fixed Effects ◽  
Panel Data Analysis ◽  
Institutional Quality ◽  
Asian Financial Crisis ◽  
Fixed Effects Model ◽  
The World

Theories on institutional change assert that exogenous shocks are critical in transforming path-dependent institutions. There is not much empiric research, however, that has investigated whether that is indeed the case. To fill this gap, this study investigates the effects of institutional quality on economic growth with a focus on East Asia before and after the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, which delivered a critical shock in economic activities and institutions in East Asia. Using panel data analysis from 1981 and 2007, I investigate whether the effect of institutional quality on economic growth differed in East Asia compared to rest of the world before the crisis and whether such relationship changed after the crisis. Using two-way fixed effects model, the estimation shows that the effect of institutional quality on economic growth was positive on average for the rest of the world after the crisis but negative for East Asia. The negative coefficient was particularly strong for the three countries—South Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand—that suffered the most during the crisis. However, in the long term, there was no significant change of this negative effect.

Secularism: The Golden Lie

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
Graham Ward
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Investigation ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Basic Concepts ◽  
Bureaucratic State ◽  
Scientific Atheism

In contemporary rhetoric, secularism, modernity, and atheism are invoked as the end of a linear narrative of historical progress, but with the anthropological insights of Bruno Latour regarding scientific atheism, Graham Ward argues that secularism and modernity are abstract, mythological concepts, a “golden lie” upon which the modern state is built (as in Plato’s Republic). Latour recognized the exclusion of the concept of “God” in scientific investigation, while at the same time scientists raised the level of “fact” to that which is absolutely true (i.e., outside of time and space). In a similar way, the demythologizing project of the Enlightenment sought to exclude religious traditions and history from the modern, secular state, but in the process, it developed a new mythology of the anti- or a-religious that began circa 1500. Instead, the basic concepts of this worldview, such as the “immanent frame,” the “buffered self,” disenchantment, and “exclusive humanism” imply their own falsehood. Even the French laicité has shifted from an antagonism toward religion to an attempted neutrality for the sake of inclusivity and the bureaucratic state.

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