Spinning Blades

Diary Entry: October 4, 2024

We had the JSD seminar today. I walked in genuinely curious, thinking “Okay, now I’ll find out why Coase’s paper is the most cited in history.”

The assigned reading wasn’t just Coase; it was Coase’s The Problem of Social Cost and Calabresi and Melamed’s “Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral.” The professor handed out printouts, and we were supposed to discuss them together.

The professor started with Coase. She said the real revolution of Coase wasn’t just the bargaining theorem, it was his idea of causation. His big point was this: Coase redefines causation. In the classic example, the noisy confectioner bothers the doctor. We’d say the confectioner is the cause of the harm. But the professor explained that Coase’s “truth” is that the problem is reciprocal. It’s not just the confectioner making noise; it’s also the doctor being there to be bothered. To have a “harm,” you need both.

I just... what? How is that a revolution? It sounds like word games.

But it got worse. We spent half the seminar on these absurd and impractical hypotheticals. The professor brought up the one about a man carrying a spinning blade, like a devil’s wheel. If he cuts people, who’s responsible?

We all said, “Obviously, the guy with the blades!”

But the professor pushed us, “What would Coase say?” The implication is that the people are also part of the problem. Why are they in the blade’s path? Why don’t they just pay the blade-man to stop?

I’m sorry, but that is the stupidest, most offensive thing I’ve ever heard in an academic setting. You’re blaming the victim for existing. How is this the intellectual foundation of Law and Economics?

I must have been shaking my head or scowling, because the professor smiled and said, “I know, it sounds crazy. You’re in good company.”

Then she told us the famous story about Coase presenting this theory at the University of Chicago. The professor said that when Coase first laid out his argument, the entire faculty “laughed at” him. They thought he was nuts. But Coase debated them for hours, and by the end of the night, he had convinced every single person in the room that he was right.

The professor told this story like it was the triumphant moment of a genius. I just sat there thinking... it sounds more like a mass delusion. It doesn’t make the “spinning blade” argument any less of a moral and logical failure.

So now I’m back in my room. I have the most-cited paper in law, which apparently argues that if a guy with spinning blades cuts you, it’s partly your fault for not bargaining with him. And a bunch of Nobel laureates all agreed!

I don’t get it. This is all just... bullshit.