My brother and sister are both older than I am and were born before my father went off to World War I.
From Douglass North
While I was there I became deeply interested in photography, and indeed the most noteworthy event in my early life was winning first, third, fourth and seventh prizes in an international competition for college and high school students.
When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco.
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.
The development of a political-economic framework to explore long-run institutional change occupied me during all of the 1980s and led to the publication of Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance in 1990.
Our family life was certainly not intellectual.
My wife and I now live in the summers in northern Michigan in an environment which is wonderfully conducive to research, and where most of my work in the last 15 years has been done.
My record at the University of California as an undergraduate was mediocre to say the best.
My father had not even completed high school when he started as an office boy working for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and I am not sure that my mother completed high school.
My early work and publications centered around expanding on the analysis of life insurance in my dissertation and its relationship to investment banking.
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