Transcript: Accidental Economist: An interview with Nobel Laureate Ronald H. Coase

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>> I've never taken a course in economics, but I became an accountant. I don't know quite how that happened. Well it's an interesting tale. I wanted to be a historian and I was told that here in England that I couldn't become a historian if I didn't know Latin and I didn't know Latin because I had gone as a young man to a school for physical defectives. But what they thought with these physical defectives meant that one was not interested in intellectual things was a strange presumption. And I started then to become a chemist and took chemistry. But in order to get a [inaudible] degree, you had to study mathematics and I did this and found I didn't like it. University of London had started an economist degree so it was inevitable that I then took an economist degree which I did.

 

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I came to America and I took a job at the University of Buffalo and after I'd been there 2 years, the University of Chicago offered me a job here and I messed the whole thing you. I first said I'd go, and then I said I wouldn't go. And indeed I wouldn't have come had it not been for the formulation of the Journal of Law and Economics because when I saw the Journal and I saw what it could do, I said, "I'll come." I became the editor and I'm very happy doing that work. I'd go to conferences, find out what people were working on, encouraged them to write articles, often not the articles they'd intended to write, but the articles I knew they could write and I wanted them to write. So I used the Journal to change views. I wanted to use the Journal to create a subject and I did. It didn't exist before.

 

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My life has been a lucky chance at all counts [assumed spelling] and perhaps that's true of everyone. If you succeed doing anything, it's a bit of luck.

 

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