In response to Tyler Cowen’s excellent new work, I have explained in two of my previous posts why Ronald Coase deserves to be considered the greatest economist of all time or GOAT, but I have not yet discussed Cowen’s last GOAT criterion: “if you sat down with the person and discussed economic issues, you would be in some way impressed.” As it happens, I actually had an opportunity to sit down with Ronald Coase and have lunch with him at his retirement home in North Chicago many years ago. (See photo below of Coase and me.) Suffice it to say it was an afternoon I will never forget. We ate hamburgers and talked about his lifelong friendship with another intellectual hero of mine, Duncan Black (as an aside, Coase’s 1993 obituary of Professor Black is still worth reading), and about our mutual admiration of Adam Smith (see here, for example). In addition, Coase and I also compared notes on a recent paper he had published in the Journal of Law & Economics finding fault with Benjamin Klein, Robert G. Crawford, and Armen A. Alchian’s work on the the acquisition of Fisher Body by General Motors (see here and here). Although by this time Coase was approaching the ripe old age of 100, I was very impressed with the English economist on many different levels, especially his wry sense of humor. Among other things, Coase mentioned how the sex ratio in his retirement home was not 1:1 but was skewed toward females!