Coase’s fable update

I have long been fascinated by the English economist Ronald Coase’s counter-intuitive idea that harms are always a reciprocal or jointly-caused problem–so much so that I wrote a paper at the end of last year titled “Coase’s fable” in which I describe the idea of reciprocal harms as an axiom or truism, trace the intellectual origins of Coase’s counter-intuitive idea, and explore its domain or outer limits. (For reference, I blogged about my 2025 Coase paper here, here, here, and here.) Since then, I presented my paper in May of 2026 at the first-ever joint conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET) and the History of Economics Society (HES) at the Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, and based on the excellent feedback I received at the conference, I have expanded the part of my paper that traces the intellectual origins of Coase’s reciprocal-harm model. (Among other things, I explore the relationship between Coase’s model and the opportunity-cost…

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