Ronald Coase and His Elders at London School of Economics

Speaker: Dr. Ning Wang, The Ronald Coase Institute

THE SPEAKER

Ning Wang, with B.S. from Beijing University and Ph.D. from University of Chicago, is editor-in-chief of Man and the Economy: the Journal of the Coase Society, Senior Fellow of Ronald Coase Institute and International Director of the Ronald Coase Center for the Study of the Economy at Zhejiang University. In 2012, he co-authored How China Became Capitalist with the late Nobel laureate, Ronald Coase. Dr. Wang has been collecting materials to write an intellectual biography of Coase.

ABSTRACT

Ronald Coase (1910-2013) was first a student and later a junior faculty member at LSE during the 1930s and 1940s. He left LSE in 1951 for University of Buffalo, partly because his work was not appreciated. Among his elders at LSE, Lionel Robbins (1898-1984) was head of the department and a leading British economist himself, under whose leadership LSE became the world’s most prominent powerhouse in economic research before WWII. F. A. Hayek (1899-1992) was a leading Austrian economist with international recognition, who would become one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. Arnold Plant (1898-1978), Coase’s mentor, had the most influence on Coase professionally and intellectually, though Plant was a marginal figure at LSE and the least known among the three. While Coase held quite cordial relations with both Robbins and Hayek, neither, according to Coase, showed much interest in his work. To his pleasant surprise, Coase, right before he passed away, found the letters Hayek wrote nominating him for the Nobel Prize in economics from 1978 to 1984; Coase seemed to be the only economist nominated by Hayek for the Prize. A letter of recommendation written by Robbins in 1950 recently came to our attention, in which Robbins praised Coase as one of “the top two or three” British economists of his generation. Coase would be equally surprised had he had a chance to read the recommendation. Actually, Coase probably would have stayed at LSE had he known Robbins’s high opinion of him. If Coase’s elders at LSE, Hayek, Robbins and Plant, all highly appreciated his work, it becomes even more puzzling why Coase remained a dissent in modern economics, while his ideas laid the foundation for the development of “law and economics” and the new institutional economics.

All are welcome. Light lunch will be provided on first-come-first-served basis.