Posted on 09/03/2013 3:29:31 PM PDT by ThethoughtsofGreg
Ronald Coase, an economist hailed as one of the top 10 greatest economic thinkers of all time, passed away Monday, September 2, 2013, just shy of 103 years of age. Coase was truly a titan in economics, publishing his first article at only 27, and producing fresh and insightful content well into his 100s. A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Coase is one of the founders of both the law and economics and new institutional economics disciplines, as well as one of the seminal thinkers in industrial organization economics and the study of social costs. He was an intellectual giant and the members of the American Legislative Exchange Council mourn his passing and celebrate his brilliant life.
Many of us remember him most fondly for his insight into social costs. These helpful videos from Learn Liberty describe Coase’s approach to so-called negative externalities:
(Excerpt) Read more at americanlegislator.org ...
Ronald H. Coase, Founding Scholar in Law and Economics, 1910-2013.He was a giant.
Much of the audience consisted of Washington journalists, members of the staffs of congressional committees, and others with similar jobs. They displayed little interest in the findings of the study, but a great deal of interest in discovering who had financed the study. Many seemed to have been convinced that the Law and Economics program at the University of Chicago had been bought by the gas industry. A large part of the audience seemed to live in a simple world in which anyone who thought prices should rise under certain circumstances was pro industry, and anyone who wanted prices to be reduced was pro consumer. I could have explained that the essence of Kitch's argument had been put forth earlier be Adam Smith, but most of the people in the audience would have assumed that Adam Smith was someone else in the pay of the American Gas Association.
Excellent story. Where did you get it?
It captures the liberal/progressive mind perfectly. That’s what we are up against in the media: English majors.
I remembered it from one of Ralph Raico's lectures about ten years back. The Struggle for Liberty Lecture 6: The New World of Capitalism. It's at about 30:10.
Thanks ThethoughtsofGreg.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase#The_Nature_of_the_Firm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase#The_Problem_of_Social_Cost
Coase is best known for two articles in particular: “The Nature of the Firm” (1937), which introduces the concept of transaction costs to explain the nature and limits of firms, and “The Problem of Social Cost” (1960), which suggests that well-defined property rights could overcome the problems of externalities (see Coase Theorem). Coase is also often referred to as the “father” of reform in the policy for allocation of the electromagnetic spectrum, based on his article “The Federal Communications Commission” (1959), where he criticises spectrum licensing, suggesting property rights as a more efficient method of allocating spectrum to users. Additionally, Coase’s transaction costs approach is currently influential in modern organizational economics, where it was reintroduced by Oliver E. Williamson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase#Political_views
When asked what he considered his politics to be, Coase stated, “I really don’t know. I don’t reject any policy without considering what its results are. If someone says there’s going to be regulation, I don’t say that regulation will be bad. Let’s see. What we discover is that most regulation does produce, or has produced in recent times, a worse result. But I wouldn’t like to say that all regulation would have this effect because one can think of circumstances in which it doesn’t.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_Conjecture
“I’ve never done anything that wasn’t obvious, and I didn’t know why other people didn’t do it,” he said. “I’ve never thought the things I did were so extraordinary.”
This is typical of truly great people, and there are very few great people responsible for actually changing the world. He had a lot of smarts, and some great genes.
That part's easy, we're all doing that a lot these days. The hard part is being constantly told by folks reading the daily press that 2 + 2 = 5.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.