"It was not until I got my first job, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and began playing chess with Don Gordon, a brilliant young theorist, that I learned economic theory"
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Economic theory, Douglass North implies, didn’t really enter his bloodstream through lectures or textbooks; it arrived over a chessboard, in the quiet brutality of a game where every move is a hypothesis and every blunder gets punished. The line is a small rebellion against the self-mythology of academic training. Coming from an economist who would later help build “new institutional economics,” it reads like a clue to his method: stop treating theory as a set of settled doctrines and start treating it as strategic reasoning under constraints.
The specific intent isn’t to dunk on formal education so much as to elevate the social setting where ideas become usable. “Brilliant young theorist” is doing double duty: Don Gordon represents intellectual rigor, but also the kind of peer-to-peer sparring that universities quietly run on. Chess becomes a stand-in for what North thought economics should be: not a moral fable about markets, but an analysis of incentives, rules, and feedback. In chess, institutions are explicit (the rules), but strategy lives in the gray space between rule and outcome. That’s North’s lifelong preoccupation in miniature.
The subtext is about how economists are made: not only by coursework, but by mentorship, competition, and the informal micro-institutions of a department. Placing the origin story at his “first job” also situates theory as a professional language learned on the job, a toolkit acquired when the stakes shift from grades to arguments, publication, and reputation.
The specific intent isn’t to dunk on formal education so much as to elevate the social setting where ideas become usable. “Brilliant young theorist” is doing double duty: Don Gordon represents intellectual rigor, but also the kind of peer-to-peer sparring that universities quietly run on. Chess becomes a stand-in for what North thought economics should be: not a moral fable about markets, but an analysis of incentives, rules, and feedback. In chess, institutions are explicit (the rules), but strategy lives in the gray space between rule and outcome. That’s North’s lifelong preoccupation in miniature.
The subtext is about how economists are made: not only by coursework, but by mentorship, competition, and the informal micro-institutions of a department. Placing the origin story at his “first job” also situates theory as a professional language learned on the job, a toolkit acquired when the stakes shift from grades to arguments, publication, and reputation.
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| Topic | New Job |
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