Hoover senior fellow Douglass C. North has been appointed the first Bartlett Burnap Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
North's work in the field of economics has been widely recognized. North received the Nobel Prize in economic sciences in 1993. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1996 and was installed as the Spencer T. Olin Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis in October 1996. In 1987, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Funding for North's appointment was provided by Bartlett Burnap of Palm Beach, Florida. Burnap has served as an overseer of the Hoover Institution since 1996. He and his wife, Candida Danielson Burnap, have supported public policy efforts of the Hoover Institution for many years.
"Douglass North is an outstanding scholar and an important contributor to public policy in our country and abroad," Bartlett Burnap said. "Supporting his work and the overall program of the Hoover Institution was an opportunity we could not pass up. This is an investment we believe will provide substantial returns, in terms of both the research it will support and as an impetus for positive change in our society."
"Any time you have the opportunity to have a Nobel laureate as a colleague, who shares our institutional values, it is special. We are deeply indebted to Bart and Candida for helping to make this happen," said Hoover director John Raisian.
Bartlett Burnap is a native of Los Angeles who attended Harvard University and the University of Southern California and served in the U.S. Air Force during the late 1950s in Japan and Korea. He is now a partner in a venture capital firm and a strong believer in limited government. Candida Burnap grew up in Los Angeles, attended Wellesley College, and received a graduate degree in education from Columbia Teachers College.
North had a long and distinguished academic career. He was a visiting fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University from 1987 to 1988 and the Pitt Professor at Cambridge University in England from 1981 to 1982.
In 1983, North was appointed the Luce Professor of Law and Liberty in the Department of Economics at Washington University and was director of the Center for Political Economy from 1984 to 1990.
In 1985, he was appointed editor of the Cambridge series of books and monographs on the political economy of institutions and decisions. He was editor of the Journal of Economic History for five years and president of the Economic History Association in 1972. He had been a twenty-year member of the Board of Directors of the National Bureau of Economic Research until 1986.
North has lectured at most major American and European universities and many Asian universities. He is the author of more than fifty articles and eight books.
That part of his research focused on the formation of political and economic institutions and the consequences of these institutions on the performance of economics through time was published in Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge University Press.)
North received his B.A. in 1942 and his Ph.D. in 1952 from the University of California, Berkeley. He also served in the U.S. Merchant Marines from 1942 to 1946.
