George Stigler
George Stigler
George Joseph Stiglerwas a U.S. economist. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1982, and was a key leader of the Chicago School of Economics, along with Milton Friedman...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth17 January 1911
CountryUnited States of America
economists exert influence minor scarcely societies
Economists exert a minor and scarcely detectable influence on the societies in which they live
weed flower competition
Competition is a tough weed, not a delicate flower.
years law giving
Why, when the economist gives advice to his society, is he so often cooly ignored? He never ceases to preach free trade, and protectionism is growing in the United States. He deplores the perverse effects of minimum wage laws, and the legal minimum is regularly raised each 3 or 5 years. He brands usury laws as a medieval superstition, but no state hurries to repeal its law.
issues mind intellectual
The Chicago Economics Department was in intellectual ferment, although the central issues of the 1930s were very different from those in later times. I had never before encountered minds of that quality at close quarters and they influenced me strongly.
native-language people citizens
A Swedish physicist can not discuss his work with fifty people unless he goes abroad. A Swedish economist can get opinions and instructions in his native language from thousands upon thousands of his fellow citizens.
self competition important
Adam Smith had one overwhelmingly important triumph: he put into the center of economics the systematic analysis of the behavior of individuals pursuing their self-interest under conditions of competition.
competition challenges citizens
The delicate and intricate pattern of competition and cooperation in the economic behavior of the hundreds of thousands of citizens of Stockholm offers a challenge to the economist that is perhaps as complex as the challenges of the physicist and the chemist.
two milton economist
All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.
confused science ideas
Mathematics has no symbols for confused ideas.
yield chicago economic
Even before I came to Chicago, I had gotten interested in the existence of dispersion of prices under conditions which economic theory said would yield a single price.
money moving car
Henry Ford made a lot of money making cars at one time, but that was a small advantage to him compared to the benefit to millions of people who for the first time in their lives were emancipated from common public carriers and could live where they wanted, move at the hours they wanted, to the places they wanted. Ford collected a billion bucks, but that was peanuts compared to the benefits.
directors fierce cliche
My interests were aroused, and my faith in the cliches of the subject destroyed, as so often with other subjects, by the discussions with my friend, Aaron Director.
training chicago graduates
My main graduate training was received at the University of Chicago from which I received the Ph.D. in 1938.
science intense sociology
That subject has lost its one time appeal to economists as our science has become more abstract, but my interest has even grown more intense as the questions raised by the sociology of science became more prominent.