TY - JOUR
T1 - Institutions and economic history
T2 - A critique of professor McCloskey
AU - Greif, Avner
AU - Mokyr, Joel
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Millennium Economics Ltd.
PY - 2016/3/1
Y1 - 2016/3/1
N2 - Professor McCloskey makes many telling and insightful points in her survey and criticism of what she terms the new institutional economics; yet there are a number of shortcomings to her paper. One is that she has bundled together a variety of quite disparate approaches to the role institutions play, and refers to them as 'neo-institutionalist'. We unbundle these different strands, and show that an undifferentiated critique is unwarranted. A second argument made by her is that an institutional approach cannot explain either the Industrial Revolution or what she calls 'the Great Enrichment'. We show that this conclusion is unwarranted and results from an overly narrow definition of institutions.
AB - Professor McCloskey makes many telling and insightful points in her survey and criticism of what she terms the new institutional economics; yet there are a number of shortcomings to her paper. One is that she has bundled together a variety of quite disparate approaches to the role institutions play, and refers to them as 'neo-institutionalist'. We unbundle these different strands, and show that an undifferentiated critique is unwarranted. A second argument made by her is that an institutional approach cannot explain either the Industrial Revolution or what she calls 'the Great Enrichment'. We show that this conclusion is unwarranted and results from an overly narrow definition of institutions.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84956758204&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/S1744137415000417
DO - 10.1017/S1744137415000417
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AN - SCOPUS:84956758204
SN - 1744-1374
VL - 12
SP - 29
EP - 41
JO - Journal of Institutional Economics
JF - Journal of Institutional Economics
IS - 1
ER -