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 UniversitĂ© CĂ´te 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 approach to economics that Lionel Robbins and F. A. Hayek developed at the London School of Economics in the 1930s, and I consider the possibility that Coase might have been influenced by Wesley Hohfeld’s influential theory of legal relations — stated simply, the idea that every legal right creates a corresponding duty, and vice versa, every legal duty implies a corresponding right.) I will say more about these substantive additions to my paper in my next two posts; in the meantime, I have posted my revised paper to SSRN. (See here.)
