Markings on a Long Journey

Abstract

His father’s diary records that Ronald Harry Coase was born at 3.25 p.m. on 29 December 1910 in a flat in the London suburb of Willesden. He was the only child of parents who exhibited a strong interest in the sporting life (his father competed in lawn bowling until his death and his mother played tennis well into her later years), but who showed ‘no interest in academic scholarship’ (Coase, 1991, p.1). As one might expect of an only child, Coase reports that he was a loner, a trait later manifested in an academic career where he did little jointly authored work, spent the last half of his career as an economist who worked in a law school, and engaged in research that in many ways made him an outsider within the economics profession.¹

‘I was never less alone than when by myself’ — Edward Gibbon, Memoirs, Vol. I, p.117.