Ronald Coase was 50 years old the year that he published “The Problem of Social Cost.” The paper’s basic intuitions were already well-formed when he wrote “The Nature of the Firm” nearly 25 years earlier. That “Social Cost” came to be written at all was only happenstance, more or less the product of being required, as a precondition of an invitation to present his work at Chicago, to make more explicit some of the basic premises that had informed his paper on the Federal Communications Commission the prior year. And the invitation was only extended in the first place because Chicago-school economists believed so strongly that those premises were wrong.

It is worth remembering, too, that, according to Coase’s own lamentations in the late 1980s, the vast majority of the economics profession had misunderstood and misapplied his key point in “Social Cost,” with the tragic consequence that the idea George Stigler dubbed “the Coase Theorem” lent credibility to Chicago-school law and economics, which in turn nourished the project to radically reconstruct the state and the global economy starting in the late 1970s. Coase did not believe the Coase theorem applied to the world in practice. As for Stigler’s idealized version, Coase thought it was not only wrong, but nonsense.

Since 1990, Coase’s original agenda, to get policy makers to base their decisions on serious, careful thinking about the comparative cost consequences of various institutional arrangements, has steadily gained ground in both domestic and international policy making, albeit not always in the form he imagined. “Governance” is sometimes used as no more than a weasel word for regulation, but it has often been used to gather together projects to assign rights and decision-making powers so as to make the best use of  local constellations of interests, knowledge and capacities, rather than trying to solve problems by creating comprehensive laws. Whatever one may think of that agenda as a matter of democratic legitimacy or pragmatic policy-making, it is preferable to the naive market boosterism of Stigler’s neoliberalism 1.0. And as much as we can say that the latter project was helped along politically by misreadings of Coase’s original intent, we should also admit that without Coase’s framing of the problem there is no Williamson, and without Williamson no “governance.”

Let me say all this again: Coase developed a world-changing idea in 1937, simply by trying to think through gaps between the idealizations of economic theory and the realities of business practice; he did not publish an articulation of that idea that ‘took’ until he was 50 years old; the articulation that brought his ideas to fame was only published because a group of well-resourced academics were so convinced he was wrong; for another 30 years, his ideas were put to uses almost completely contrary to those he had intended. It is only now, 15 years after his death, over 50 years since Social Cost, and 80 years after he first developed his original insight, that we can fairly say that his ideas are being put to use in earnest.

So, let us remember in our infinite humility how little we can know about whether our ideas are good ones, what it might take for those ideas to take hold, what uses they might be applied to if they are taken up, and how those uses may ultimately shape the world. As for the idea of transaction costs: is it good news, or is it bad news? It is still too soon to say. As for our own ideas, it is unfortunately too soon to even ask.

One of the thing that I now worry about more than I used to, given the news, is that everything that goes on in the world is within an order of magnitude the result of people spinning the wheel on a random process that allows folly to linger as orthodoxy just long enough to be embarrassing to our descendants—like bellbottoms or crocs. I mean, we got to the moon, and iPods exist, so it can’t be performative error-echos all the way down, right? Still, sometimes when it comes to efforts to order our lives together, it feels like every field of knowledge—law, economics, psychology, sociology—works this way.

This premise puts in serious question the lengths that I will go to be rigorous in my work, to be fair to my sources, to feel satisfied that my claims are backed up by relevant, substantial evidence. If winning ideas are drawn from a pot without any bias toward nuanced claims or good ideas or rigorous evidence, why do we bother doing what we do? It’s not just that maybe I could have been smoking this whole time if it doesn’t actually cause cancer, it’s more broadly a sense of “the worst are full of passionate intensity and the best/lack all conviction.”

Why be so fastidious about reading the bus schedule correctly, when all it means in practice is that, some person having convinced the bus driver that the schedule was wrong, we are sat in certainty that we got the time right, in a town the bus isn’t actually coming back to until after the Christmas holidays?

At the New York Review of books, Masha Gessen writes about Trump and the language of the autocrat. It’s a great essay about an important issue, but it seems to go astray in its diagnosis of the issue.

Trump also has a talent for using words in ways that make them mean nothing. Everyone is great and everything is tremendous. Any word can be given or taken away. NATO can be “obsolete” and then “no longer obsolete”—this challenges not only any shared understanding of the word “obsolete” but our shared experience of linear time.

And then there is Trump’s ability to take words and throw them into a pile that means nothing.

Here is an excerpt, chosen from many similar ones, from his interview with the AP about his first hundred days in office:
Number one, there’s great responsibility. When it came time to, as an example, send out the fifty-nine missiles, the Tomahawks in Syria. I’m saying to myself, “You know, this is more than just like, seventy-nine [sic] missiles. This is death that’s involved,” because people could have been killed. This is risk that’s involved, because if the missile goes off and goes in a city or goes in a civilian area—you know, the boats were hundreds of miles away—and if this missile goes off and lands in the middle of a town or a hamlet …. every decision is much harder than you’d normally make. [unintelligible] … This is involving death and life and so many things. … So it’s far more responsibility. [unintelligible] ….The financial cost of everything is so massive, every agency. This is thousands of times bigger, the United States, than the biggest company in the world.
Here is a partial list of words that lose their meaning in this passage: “responsibility,” the number “fifty-nine” and the number “seventy-nine,” “death,” “people,” “risk,” “city,” “civilian,” “hamlet,” “decision,” “hard,” “normal,” “life,” the “United States.” Even the word “unintelligible,” inserted by the journalist, means nothing here, because how can something be unintelligible when uttered during a face-to-face interview?

This seems wrong to me. The words when used in these ways are not drained of meaning. They are not rendered meaningless. Words, when used these ways, are doing things, and those doings are part of the meaning. A bird that lands on a wire does not stop having wings. Someone who is pointing his fingers in opposite directions is still pointing. Catch a tire on your fish hook. You are still fishing, and you’ve still caught something. Ask yourself: why is Trump using these words, not others? ‘Responsibility’ is in the quote because it is supposed to be, and if Trump gets away with having it enter and exit sidewise, it is because people do not listen the way that we think: they hear buzz words connected by a frayed filament of grammar, and are thereby mollified, appeased, pacified. They fill in the blanks. The blanks do not work the way we think either. Yes, no, there is no propositional sense, no report. But a great deal is being communicated, and deliberately so, through connotation, association, subject-verb-object and Trump being the speaker.

We do not like it. But no one wants to eat a tire, either. And that does not make it correct to say that pappy caught nothing fishing, so we’re eating nothing for dinner. As Austin taught us, when we ask, mouth full of rubber, “is there any salt?” we expect more than just an account of what’s in the kitchen cupboard.

One of the unexplored concepts for a themed blog or tumblr or twitter account or…—anyway, a concept which lays fallow for reasons that will quickly be made clear—would have a title something like “read together.”

To explain: the upsides of being in my location in a global division of labour that nominally assigns me the task of reading books and articles, and writing down my thoughts about what I have said cannot be overstated. Among the downsides is living in a professional community that is continually, constantly training me in the habit of using the passive voice; another is that the same voracious curiosity which undergirds the satisfaction I draw from my work is also a constant source of frustration insofar as I am forced, in trying to make my way from the reading to the writing, to leave interesting thoughts by the way side. And nothing is more frustrating than having to abandon an apparent parallel, a subtle link, between two sources. Part of the recipe of being a successful academic, apparently, lies in cultivating a boundless curiosity while curating a strict discipline over the paths we allow it to take us down. A capacity for caprice, certainly, but also the prudence to almost never exercise it.

The tone of “read together” would thus be imperative: it would offer two excerpts from my reading online, in a tone of invitation, and with an implied plea for the reader to do something with materials that I am sure could produce insight if only their relation to one another were fully explored. So, for example, from a masterful review of the issues raised by the trial of Oscar Pistorius, South Africa’s famed “blade runner,” for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp:

The full citation from Corinthians tattooed on Pistorius’s upper back reads:

I do not run like a man running aimlessly;
I do not fight like a man beating the air;
I execute each stride with intent;
I beat my body and make it my slave
I bring it under my complete subjection
To keep myself from being disqualified
After having called others to the contest.

The line about making my body my slave is not in most translations from Corinthians, nor is subjection described as ‘complete’. Pistorius was raising the stakes. He was also punishing, or even indicting, himself.

And, from a shorter piece on the causes of the recent rise in injuries in the NFL:

Advertisements are now composed entirely of jump cuts between rippling bodies yelling, barking, testifying to some endless purgatory of reps, sets, and routines. Menacing homilies about commitment linger on screen to be joined by this model of shoe or that style of gear. “Every single day,” we hear Tom Brady chant stoically, “every single day,” as his image, multiplied a thousandfold by technology, drills relentlessly with itself, perfectly in sync, in a macabre echo of authoritarian spectacle.”You are the sum of all your training,” Under Armour threatens us, before urging, finally, at the end, “Rule Yourself.” In its unalloyed praise for the eternal necessity of discipline, the sports commercial is a worthy heir to Puritan austerity. Excess physique is grace rewarded. Lean muscle is proof that God loves us and wants us to be strong.

See? There is something there. There is also, at a stretch, a cute echo back to the molding of the self in the academic life, in that “Rule Thyself.” But I tell myself I have other places that I must direct my energies, so let me just quote from Horkheimer and Adorno:

It is not merely that domination is paid for by the alienation of men from the objects’ dominated: with the objectification of spirit, the very relations of men—even those of the individual to himself—were bewitched.

No doubt somebone, somewhere, is already putting these pieces together. After all, somebody is always one step ahead, better prepared, more disciplined. That’s why we have to keep training, right?

If you supervise a graduate student, or a student doing an honours thesis, the offer to do some research assistance for you can be an attractive proposition. If your student is lucky, he or she may actually get to do research in this research assistant job, for which he or she will get almost vanishingly small credit but through which, at least, he or she may actually learn things that are valuable to their development as an intellectual. True, in many cases research assistance work turns out to be little more than footnote checking, but even here the work allows the student to read a text he or she has some subject matter interest in. While the work might sometimes end up having little to no relation to his or her actual academic interests, even in these marginal cases there may be some peripheral learning about the nitty-gritty ins-and-outs of the academic grind. Booking hotels, ordering letterhead and answering emails about asking whether a conference participant can get partial reimbursement for a flight upgrade to business class (no, they can’t) may all be taxing, but there are certain inescapable, technical dimensions to academic life. While having a handle on the mess that goes into planning a conference (or getting a book published, etc.) may not always be what a student signed up for when he or she took on a “research assistant” position, being able to handle these technical details–and technical glitches–is still educational.

Now: even when such jobs get advertised across the department and include some vague description of the work to be performed and even in the ideal case when there is an opportunity to discuss the details of the job with you before you start working together, the students who end up taking on the work are still inevitably entering a Faustian bargain. Working in most cases for substandard wages justified by the perfect storm of universities budget cuts, neoliberal managerialism that valorizes almost any labour-side cost-cutting, and wage floors for research assistants negotiated under university-wide collective bargaining that end up being treated as ceilings, these students justify the choice to themselves by hoping that the professors they work with will be able to write them a reference letter, or a faith that work inside the university is somehow more intrinsically beneficial than work outside it, and a belief, as per above, that they may learn something more in an experience working alongside an academic whose work they admire (at least by osmosis), than in working part time outside research proper.

How true is this narrative on the part of the student? The only fair answer is “it depends.” Sometimes a positive experience with a student will leave the two of you happy, life-long collaborators; perhaps, your experience will if nothing else provide you with sufficient interpersonal knowledge to write a sincere, supportive reference letter; if you are generous, the student may actually learn something from you that would have been impossible to get out of a classroom experience alone. On the other hand, some of your interactions with research assistants will inevitably be limited to a single meeting, a few documents emailed back and forth, and a few hours of their time that they will never get back but that, if you are lucky, will still have made a contribution to your academic projects. Tant pis.

Or more strongly: caveat emptor. For, despite all of the downsides of the Faustian bargain laid out above, we can at least say that it is a bargain, viz. a bilateral agreement. Nothing in this hypothetical forces the student to answer the job posting for a research assistant, nothing requires them to take the job once they have heard what it actually involves—or even to keep it once the contents turn out not to match what was on the label—and nothing stops them from finding some other, quite possibly more lucrative, part time job if they actually need financial support to complete their studies.

This story has a few small problems, and one big one. On the one hand, it is relatively easy to find holes to poke in this simple version. Some international students can only take on-campus jobs. Quitting any job is awkward, let alone a job under a professional whose field you want to continue working in after you quit. Students, unfortunately, don’t always know better, even if we can say they should. Furthermore, students shouldn’t be made to bear all the responsibility for professors who are simply terrible at delegating, and worse at managing.

But if the student taking the job is actually your student, the story fails much more catastrophically. The situation that plays when you act both in an academic-supervisory relationship to the student and as their boss, rehearses all the arguments about the nature of real power in employment relationships which labour lawyers have long offered to economists who believe that the existence of labour markets somehow implicitly discipline employer behavior. Namely, it is a situation in which it is very difficult for your student to say no. Your students quite rightly believe that you are a central component in the apparatus they use to push along their academic career. They rely on you for reference letters, not only for subsequent degrees and future job applications, but also for funding applications internal, national or international, occasionally conferences and symposia. There may be a collection of departmental administrative tasks you are required to fulfill on his or her behalf. You are expected, in every case, to help usher your student’s research project toward completion, which involves at minimum signing off once it has reached a stage where it can be read by others academics but might also include, if the student is fortunate, reading drafts, discussing roadblocks, and suggesting paths for further research. Often, bless them, these students will look up to you, or admire you or at the very least admire your work. But even if you have ended up together by chance, from the perspective of the student you essentially act as a monopolistic supplier of a large number of very important services.

It would be easy at this point to lapse into an overdetermined analogy of the economics of service provision between you and your students: overpricing of services under inadequate levels of competition, what could be accounted for as an underpricing of their services in the resulting barter relationship or, equivalently, as a mispricing of the services that they would provide to you. Luckily, there is a much easier way to explain the resulting conflict of interest. The dynamic the two of you face is this: your students depends on you to say ‘yes’ to a number of requests that they might make of you over the space of a year or longer, and every ‘no’ that greets a request you make of them will inevitably cast the shadow of some potential ‘no’ from you, no matter how remote. The relationship between you and your students is not reciprocal, cannot be. Yet the logic of reciprocation–I scratch your back, you scratch mine–is hard to shake, and harder to deny. You may want to believe that a student’s refusal to do some task for you, or their decision to quit a task halfway through, might have no effect on your treatment of them as a supervisor. But if so, you should ask yourself of your past and current students, of those who have done work for you and those who haven’t, which you know more about, have spent more time with, or feel generosity for.

In part, the worst aspects of this dynamic can be avoided by the steps identified above: opening the job to all the students in the department, including details about the nature of the work, and discussing it with candidates before hiring someone. If the work involves substantive research, then it is likely that your own charges are likely to not only be most qualified, but also most interested. Yet work that involves substantive research is also least likely to be a bad deal, and therefore minimizes the chance that the student will feel stuck doing work they don’t want to do by their inability to say ‘no’ to you.

Okay. Now let us remind ourselves that we live in a world where women attend university at much higher rates than men, but are still underrepresented in the highest levels of politics, industry and academia. Let us take as an example that women, now nearly half of law school entrants in the United States, remain a tiny sliver of partners at high-profile law firms. But note specifically that though women are overrepresented at universities, they remain less than half of the population of doctoral candidates. That successfully tenured women at universities is a smaller portion still of all tenured academics. That when academic job applications are submitted under female names, they are systematically rated as less competent, even when the content of the applications are otherwise the same. It’s probably worth thinking for a moment about how the perpetuation of these inequalities are linked simultaneously both to women’s persistently outsized contribution to childcare responsibilities (and indeed, to all care responsibilities) and to the perpetuation of stereotypes about women’s natural role reflected in the idea that any given women is likely to take significant time off of work to engage in child-rearing. Perhaps too we can think about how people’s perceptions of their capacities, and especially women’s perceptions of their capacities, are strongly influenced by both stereotypes and how others characterize their capacities.

Is it really necessary for me to spell out the rest? Does the sense now swim into view of why asking your female students, and your female students alone, to perform childcare responsibilities for you, might contribute to the perpetuation of academic inequality between men and women? When certain of your students are asked to spend some portion of their time, not doing substantive research with you, not editing or footnoting your work, not even phoning an airline to ask for a free upgrade to business class for a conference keynote (“I am sorry, ma’am, but that’s just not possible”), but instead performing a task that is stereotypically in the bailiwick of women, is it clear why this could only be understood as a material disadvantage to them, given that the opportunity cost is precisely time that could be spent on their own intellectual and academic development, including by answering belligerent conference emails for some other professor? Is it clear how, when you ask not just some students, but your students to do this work, that this material disadvantage is very hard to attribute in any way to them, given the tribulations involved in saying no to one’s supervisor? Might asking your female students to do this work, when you would not ask your male students to come over and do your gardening, risk giving them a sense that you somehow view them in a less full light, academically, than you view their male colleagues? Might this not-so-subtle implication not only hurt their feelings, but detract from their desire or willingness or confidence in their own work, in ways that materially detract from their success? If they did avoid such hurt feelings, could they do so other than by taking your request as anything other than an affront, which would, even if it didn’t impact on their confidence, nonetheless sour your relationship with them? Might a soured relationship with you harm their academic careers as well?

Don’t do it. Just don’t. Childrearing is hard! Sometimes you need a babysitter. If you have no shame, go ahead and post the job through the departmental email list, and see if you get any bites. But there are professionals, trustworthy professionals, who can be hired to do this work for you. Finding them, it’s true, often takes research. Luckily, you are a research professional, and if you don’t feel like finding a babysitter is a good use of your time, you can always pay one of your students to find one for you. Experience with balancing childcare responsibilities with an academic career, after all, is a lesson we can all learn.