Tom, you are correct to stress the tangled lineage from Marshall’s “external economies,” through Pigou’s uncompensated services and disservices, to Coase’s transaction costs and social costs. Marshall had already treated information spillovers and agglomeration effects as central economic phenomena, many of which later reappear under the heading of transaction costs. The warning that Coase’s “stepping stone” of zero transaction costs is conceptually slippery is also fair: transaction costs and social costs can transform into one another, and careless use of the distinction can obscure rather than clarify real economic processes.
Nevertheless, it would seem to be taking a step too far to suggest that this conceptual instability undermines Coase’s argument. Coase never claimed a hard ontological boundary between transaction costs and social costs - the distinction is functional and analytical. Its purpose was to show that once the costs of using markets are recognized, welfare conclusions change. That insight survives terminological messiness that you described. The most important contribution of your response, however, is your political point about digital planning: contemporary digital coordination systems lower transaction costs for large corporations while raising them for everyone else. This does not refute Coasean logic but reveals its class-structured application under capitalism. From a Marxian-Coasean perspective, this reinforces the case that coordination technologies are instruments of power, and that the real issue is not whether planning reduces transaction costs in the abstract, but who controls planning and how those costs are distributed socially. That's why we need Marx here. Otherwise, Charles's point that ," This is all technical stuff that leaves out the main class choice. " becomes fully justified. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#39901): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39901 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/116961607/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
