There 're a lot of voluntary solutions to lots of problems that're not profit maximizing or or what we would normally think of as private enterprise, but they're privately agreed to. We should really be thinkig about bottom up versus top das top dat or or a distinction i learned from inclint, coercive versus voluntary. And and again, make to make it as cosian as possible. You want the solution, whether it's the government run solution or the emergent solution that's voluntary or some hybrid, to be the one that minimizes cost. It's not ly a theoretical thing that emerges out of the blackboard. Your elegant model imposed in the best possible way on reality will
Don Boudreaux of George Mason University and Cafe Hayek talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the intellectual legacy of Ronald Coase. The conversation centers on Coase's four most important academic articles. Most of the discussion is on two of those articles, "The Nature of the Firm," which continues to influence how economists think of firms and transaction costs, and "The Problem of Social Cost," Coase's pathbreaking work on externalities.