The University of Wisconsin-Madison is a popular choice for ambitious students from the Twin Cities. The campus is situated on scenic Mendota Lake and the town of Madison provides a fair amount of diversion. The school has a strong reputation and graduates often go on to lucrative careers in Chicago. We toured the school not too long ago.
But my son was to be a Gopher not a Badger.
What I didn’t know at the time was that UW was the academic home to economics professor and institutional economics pioneer John R Commons for nearly thirty years. I’ve never been satisfied with the definition of of institutions as the sum of rules, laws and norms. As it turns out neither was Commons. He provides this helpful narrowing of the idea in a paper called Instituational Economics published in 1931 in the American Economic Review, Vol 21.
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