Nobel

Student Diary: February 6, 2025

This is getting deeper.

Coase won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991. I looked up the official prize citation. It was awarded “for his discovery and clarification of the significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy”.

Property rights?

Are you kidding me? I’m right back where I started. My professor explicitly told me Coase is not about property. I even convinced myself I was wrong, that the “bundle of rights” was just an old idea he was borrowing. But here it is, in the Nobel Prize citation. The most prestigious committee in the world says his entire contribution is about property rights and transaction costs.

So who is wrong? My professor? Or the Nobel Committee?

But the date is what really got me. 1991.

That date just sticks in my brain. 1991. The exact same year the Soviet Union officially collapsed.

Is that just a coincidence? It feels... too perfect. The great champion of free markets is awarded the Nobel for his work on property rights at the precise historical moment that the world’s largest experiment in abolishing private property comes crashing down.

It feels symbolic. I feel like I’m pulling at a thread, and something is starting to unravel. This is not a simple “torts” paper.