Institutional change takes place within an institutional framework. In short, not everything is up for grabs all at once. In the following essay, Lee Alston and Joseph Ferrie are careful to specify which institutions are constraints to everyone and which institutions are choice variables to some actors and constraints to others. Alston and Ferrie argue that the institution of social control in the U.S. South – the laws and customs in the South that resulted in a lack of civil rights and condonement of violence – increased the value to agricultural workers of having a protector/ employer. Augmenting the value of a protector was the absence of a federal welfare system that would have substituted for some of the value of a paternalistic employer. The reader should note that in the Alston–Ferrie framework social control and the absence of a federal welfare system placed constraints on agricultural labor but also served as choice variables for the very people who were protectors – the politically powerful agricultural elite. The federal welfare net ultimately expanded as a result of technological changes that changed the economic incentives faced by the Southern elite; it no longer paid the South to block the demands of Northern liberal politicians. The essay highlights how institutions give rise to incentives in contracts and also how the dynamics of an economic system can lead to institutional changes.