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Foreword by Ronald Coase
The purpose of a Foreword to a book is to tell the prospective reader what he (or she) will gain by reading it. In the case of this collection of Steven Cheung’s articles, it is both an easy and an enjoyable task. Steven Cheung’s articles make clear what is wrong with so much of current writing on economics and what should be done to put it right. He does this by example, showing through his own work how economics should be done.
Steven Cheung was fortunate that he went to UCLA, where he studied under Armen Alchian and Jack Hirshleifer. His doctoral thesis, The Theory of Share Tenancy, was the work of an assured and original economist. This work was regarded so highly that he was awarded the prestigious Postdoctoral Fellowship in Political Economy at the University of Chicago in 1967, and was appointed assistant professor the following year. The University of Chicago Press published his thesis as a book in 1969. While at Chicago he studied the approaches to economic questions of Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Aaron Director, Harry Johnson, Arnold Harberger, Theodore Schultz, Gale Johnson and others, including me. But Steven Cheung was no mere imitator. He absorbed their ideas and made them part of his own.
The work that he has done since then, much of which is included in this volume, has more than fulfilled the promise of his first work. As always, he has concentrated on understanding why the economic system behaves as it does, rather than taking as his first aim, how the economic system ought to behave and how to bring this about. In his analysis of how the system operates, he uses a keen observation of the facts to support his argument. His writing is detailed, perceptive and illuminates the questions he discusses. He examines many questions in this book, seeing them, in the main, through the lens provided by the concepts of property rights and transaction costs. He demonstrates their usefulness by discussing, among others, price controls, intellectual property rights, the structure of contracts, and, a favorite of mine, the contracting of the service of bees for pollination.
What is particularly interesting is that he uses these same concepts in examining the extraordinarily interesting events which are now under way in China. Included in this volume is a paper Steven Cheung wrote in 1981 (it was published in 1982) with the title, “Will China Go Capitalist?” His answer, which at the time was regarded as wildly improbable, was that it would. Subsequent events, however, have vindicated Cheung’s prediction. As Steven Cheung says, in a later paper, “Whatever the future holds, Deng Xiaoping’s Great Transformation must be regarded as one of the most remarkable chapters in economic history.” I regard what is going on in China as not only remarkable but of the greatest importance. The struggle for China is, in my view, the struggle for the world. The “Great Transformation”, if not interrupted, will have the most profound and beneficial effect on economic thought, not simply in Asia but also in Europe and the Americas. Readers of this book, by following these events with the aid of the concepts of property rights and transaction costs, will better understand what is going on.
I gained immensely from discussions with Steven Cheung some forty years ago. This book will enable the reader to participate in a similar intellectual adventure.
R. H. Coase, August 2005
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