At 21 Ronald Coase asked why firms exist at all if prices organise an economy, and answered that using the market has a cost. The paper he published in 1937, at 26, lay largely unused for a generation and has since been cited more than 15,000 times. Set against its critics and against several hundred statistical tests, the question has held up better than the answer. The forecast often made in its name, that cheap communication would dissolve the firm, was never his.
By Raphael Bauer37 min read
Photo: University of Chicago Law School, via Wikimedia Commons. Attribution.
On 10 October 1932 a 21-year-old lecturer in Dundee wrote to Ronald Fowler about the first lecture of a course he had just begun. “As it was a new approach (I think) to this subject, I was quite pleased with myself,” he reported. “One thing I can say is that I made it all up myself.” He had asked his students why firms exist at all in an economy where prices are supposed to do the organising, and had given them an answer: “I found the reason in the costs of conducting these marketing transactions.” Then he asked Fowler: “What do you think of the idea?”
A rich Philadelphian's son promised workers that improving manual work by scientific method would raise wages and profits together. His famous anecdote, the story of a labourer he called Schmidt, did not happen that way, and under oath he said that no firm used his system in full. Yet his claim stands to this day: method beats habit, and pay can rise with output.
By Raphael Bauer46 min read
The best-known scene in the literature of management opens with a question: “Schmidt, are you a high-priced man?” A labourer at the Bethlehem steel works in Pennsylvania, paid $1.15 a day for carrying 92-pound bars of pig iron …
Max Weber is remembered for saying that Protestantism made capitalism. He called that thesis foolish in the essay itself, and one row of the school statistics the essay opens with adds up to 109 per cent. The tests of the past two decades find Protestants a little keener on work than Catholics, and no sign that they saved more or that their cities grew faster. What he told three hundred Austrian officers in Vienna in June 1918 has lasted better: that when the state takes over the economy, the officials rule, not the workers. He thought the trained official unbeatable at running things, and feared him for it.
By Raphael Bauer48 min read
On 13 June 1918 a German professor stood up in Vienna before some three hundred officers of the Austro-Hungarian army and talked for an hour and a half about socialism. He had not taught a course for more than eighteen years and had …
A record 288,579 Germans emigrated in 2025, three quarters of them graduates, and the country is losing its best people: so runs the claim. Nearly half of that record went to a destination the statistical office lists as unknown, and its own notes say many of those people never left Germany. What remains is real and about half the size. By the standards of its neighbours and of its own past few Germans leave, and far more graduates from abroad live in Germany than German graduates live abroad. Two things survive the check: the net loss of citizens is the largest since 2008, and no statistic records who is leaving.
By Raphael Bauer45 min read
On 1 June 2026 the Federal Statistical Office published Germany’s migration figures for 2025. On its count more Germans left the country than came back, for the twenty-first year running, and the loss had grown from 81,000 to 97,000. …
