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The Mainstream Iconoclast
The death of Ronald Coase (1910-2013) at 102-almost certainly a record for any economist of note-put an end to one of the longest and most illustrious careers in academia. Not only had Coase received the highest accolades of the profession-headed by the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, of course, but also multiple honorary doctorates from leading universities, fellowships in the American Economic Association and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the first presidency of the International Society for New Institutional Economics, and more-but he was widely regarded as among the greatest and most influential economists of the past century. This was a stunning achievement, considering the fact that Coase had never received a doctorate in economics. Furthermore, Coase-whose work as a scholar and as a journal editor helped to establish the new legal discipline of law and economics-spent half of his life as an economist on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School, not the Economics Department. Even a cursory examination of Coase's biography will underline how unorthodox his path to eminence was and how amazingly successful he was at unearthing the most profound truths while often marching out of lockstep with the profession and, indeed, the world at large. Though Coase's fame and influence were enormous, his reputation did not really peak until very late in his life. I can recall, just a year or two before he received the Nobel, a conversation I had with a distinguished economist who scoffed at the suggestion that Coase was a worthy future laureate. After all, hadn't Coase written only "two good papers"?
Such underestimation of Ronald Coase, both of his abilities and his accomplishments, seems to have been a marked aspect of much of his life.
As a youngster in England, he had suffered problems with his legs that caused him to be schooled at a boys' institute for "physical defectives." Coase quipped that it shared grounds with the school for "mental defectives" and, perhaps he thought, even some of the curriculum. Remarking on economists' frequent classroom use of basket weaving as an example of a low-skilled activity, Coase said, "I did study basket weaving. It's not simple at all. In fact, it's rather more complicated than economists expect."
As...