Remembering Ronald Coase

A short Harvard Business Review piece published on September 3, 2013, the day after Ronald Coase died at the age of 102 — a commemorative note rather than an analytic essay.

On McCord’s list it is placed as an entry point rather than as a contribution: it sits immediately after Coase’s own “The Problem of Social Cost” and immediately before David Friedman’s The World According to Coase, in a run that also includes “The Nature of the Firm” and a late Coase interview. Coase’s two famous papers are what that run is organized around — the 1937 question of why firms exist at all, answered by the cost of transacting, and the 1960 reframing of externalities as a question of how rights are assigned and whether the parties can bargain.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in the curriculum’s institutions, property rights and law section, where the list deliberately mixes primary papers with short accessible pieces about them; this is one of the latter, bracketing Coase’s own work rather than standing apart from it.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Institutions, Property Rights, and the Law. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Ronald Coase — the economist the piece commemorates.
• Institutions — the field his two papers founded.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.