Ronald Coase Quotes

You wouldn't think there was a need for a Coase Theorem, really.

I'm no enthusiast for the Coase Theorem. I don't like it, but it's widely used.

I think I have met nearly all the Laureates in Economics. Among the few I haven't met, I suppose I'd most like to meet Ronald Coase because of his legendary power to persuade his colleagues of the validity of the Coase Theorem.

To start with, anybody who would like the world to be a better place should be able to think like an economist.

When you are on assignment, film is the least expensive thing in a very practical sense. Your time, the person's time, turns out to be the most valuable thing.

The economist rarely examines the presuppositions of the models with which he works. The economist simply commences with individuals as evaluating, choosing, and acting units. This starting point for analysis necessarily draws attention to the choice or decision environment for the individuals who must make selections from among the alternatives.

In economics, one of the most important concepts is 'opportunity cost' - the idea that once you spend your money on something, you can't spend it again on something else.

Textbooks describe economics as the study of the allocation of scarce resources. That definition may be the 'what,' but it certainly is not the 'why.'

The lens of contract focuses predominantly on gains from trade whereas orthodoxy is focused on resource allocation.

The free market is the most efficient for utilizing resources and responding to needs, but there are many human needs which find no place on the market.

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

Actually, in my advanced, high-falutin' frontier economics, I often work with what I define as 'money metric utility,' and I ask people, 'Do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?'

What is so terrible about transaction costs? On what basis are they considered the ultimate evil, so that their minimization must override all other considerations of choice, freedom, and justice?

The economic analysis of law has had many good ideas. It's had one great idea -like, world-transforming idea, I think. And the idea is, when you're stuck, minimize the sum of the costs of decisions and the costs of errors.

The tradition of Chicago price theory is a good one, and it is a low-tech methodology that tries to apply simple economic theory to the world.

In well-functioning markets, price equals opportunity cost. Meaning that the proper way to price out and charge us for things is to charge us what those resources could otherwise have produced. This is a lesson the Soviet Union never learned at all, and the rest is history.

Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.

About the only useful thing my economics degree taught me was that, in all decisions in life, you have to do a cost-benefit analysis.

The problem with opportunity cost is that opportunity cost is divided among many, many things.

The free lunch has still to be invented.

Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.

When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Economics is not an attempt to generalize human desires or human behavior; but to generalize the phenomena of price.

Do not get yourself into the illusion that there is something so unique about the question of organ or body parts ... that the general rules of economics do not apply.