Ronald Coase - Great minds of our time

It is my great pleasure to finally fulfill my earlier promise to blog about professor Ronald H. Coase in my Great Minds of Our Time series.

As I blogged earlier, “Here is prof. Coase’s 2003 Coase Centennial Speech (500MB QuickTime file, recommend downloading it before you watch it) from Ronald Coase Institute’s online material section.” I now can say I have watched or listened to the video more than three times now, and I am sure I will still learning from it when I watch it again.

I am going to use a different approach to blog about professor Ronald H. Coase for this Great Minds of Our Time entry. Here is my Top 10 list,

1. Ronald is a really funny and sharp witted man as we clearly can see from his 2003 Coase Centennial Speech.
2. Well, he does have a Nobel Prize in Economics.
3. Ronald’s “The Federal Communications Commission” has helpped governments around the world “make” billions from Frequency Spectrum Auctions. (including the latest round of auction by the FCC in U.S.)
4. When describing a ground breaking discussion where his idea in the FCC paper fundamentally shifted the thinking of University of Chicago, he said, “I could not understand why a statement, the equivalent of 2+2=4, should be treated on the par with e = m c square.“
5. His 1974 “The Lighthouse in Economics” not only shed light in economics but also taught us an important lesson in not to take things for granted and the fruits in doing research from the ground up with real data.
6. Have I already said that he is a funny (and humble) man? (smile)
7. And he was 93 years young when he gave the speech in 2003!
8. Millions of Chinese have learned about Coase’s work even before he won his Prize in 1991 because of Steven Cheung. (As an aside, Steven Cheung bid $25 (in an used books/magazines auction) and bought a copy of the 1958 first issue of Journal of Law and Economics which contains Ronald’s “The Federal Communications Commission“.)
9. I want to thank Prof. Steven Cheung again for introducing ideas from great economists like Professors Coase and Friedman to millions of Chinese over the years.
10. Ronald, age 93 then, said this at the 2003 Coase Centennial Speech, “New ideas are most likely to come from the young. Who are also the group most likely to recognize the significance of those ideas.“