Institutions

Douglas W. Allen. The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World. 267 pp. University of Chicago. (2012).
Throughout this book the hypothesis speaks with one voice: a logical, economic connection exists between a wide range of bizarre pre-modern rules and customs, and the evolution of these institutions into the modern world. What on the surface seem to be archaic, inefficient institutions created by people who just did not know better, turn out to be ingenious solutions to the measurement problems of the day." (227)