This morning’s Observer column remembering Ronald Coase.

When the news broke last week that Ronald Coase, the economist and Nobel laureate, had died at the age of 102, what came immediately to mind was Keynes’s observation that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”. Most of the people running the great internet companies of today have probably never heard of Coase, but, in a way, they are all his slaves, because way back in 1932 he cracked the problem of explaining how firms are structured, and how and why they change as circumstances change. Coase might have been ancient, but he was certainly not defunct…