Ronald Coase on Externalities, the Firm, and the State of Economics

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2012

⏱️ 60 minutes

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Summary

Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase of the University of Chicago talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his career, the current state of economics, and the Chinese economy. Coase, born in 1910, reflects on his youth, his two great papers, "The Nature of the Firm" and "The Problem of Social Cost". At the end of conversation he discusses his new book on China, How China Became Capitalist (co-authored with Ning Wang), and the future of the Chinese and world economies.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our e-mail address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you.
0:37.5	Today is May 8, 2012, and my guest is Ronald Kose. Professor Kose won the Nell-Bell Prize in 1991,
0:47.0	and he is the author of two of the most important economics articles of the 20th century. The nature
0:52.9	of the firm published in 1937, and the problem of social costs published in 1960. He is perhaps one of the
1:00.6	five most influential economists of the last 100 years, and I'm very happy that he has been alive
1:06.5	for all 100 of those years and a little bit more, having been born in 1910. Professor Kose,
1:12.7	welcome to e-con talk. Well, I'm very pleased to be talking to you, and I'm really
1:21.2	looking forward to what we're going to say. First, I want to ask you about your youth. How did you
1:30.2	get interested in economics, and how did you end up in the United States? Well, you've
1:39.4	realized I was born in London. I was born to parents who went to school, went to work in
1:55.0	12th, 12 years old, so they had very little education. So I had very little education. I was very
2:24.6	weak in my legs, and I went to a school for physical defectives, one by the local council, and we were
2:39.0	taught very little. I remember learning how to make a basket with a basket, and how to weave it.
2:51.0	That was the sort of thing I was taught. I had very little education until I went to the secondary school.
3:07.4	How did you get from a school for physical defectives to become a graduate student in economics?
3:16.2	Oh, I got a scholarship from the local council to go to the secondary school to kill one
3:28.4	grandma, and I went there, and while there I studied scholarship, and I'm trying to think
3:58.1	just what I did, but I really didn't start studying until I got to a secondary school where I had a
	...

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