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North earned his Ph.D. in economics at the University of California at Berkeley, but by his own admission learned how to reason like an economist from Donald Gordon, one of his colleagues at his first job at the University of Washington. In the early 1960s, North helped found cliometrics, which applies economics and quantitative methods to the study of economic history (named after Clio, the muse of history). One of his early major outputs from this work was his 1961 book, The Economic Growth of the United States from 1790 to 1860. In it he showed how one sector of the economy, cotton plantations, stimulated economic development in other sectors and led to specialization and interregional trade. In 1968 North published an article showing that organizational change was more important than technological change in increasing productivity in ocean shipping.