The Social Change Project at the Mercatus Center was honored to congratulate Nobel laureate economist Douglass North and his co-authors, John J. Wallis and Barry Weingast, on the publication of their latest book, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Recorded Human History (Cambridge University Press, 2009). A lecture panel featuring the three authors and moderated by Professor John Nye, was followed by a reception.

The book integrates the problem of violence into a larger social science and historical framework, showing how economic and political behaviors are closely linked. It compares "natural" to "modern" states and provides a framework for understanding the two types of social orders, why modern states are both politically and economically more developed, and how some 25 countries have made the transition between the two types.