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
chicago
In 1958, I came to Chicago where I have remained.
topics size survivor
In the 1950s, I proposed the survivor method of determining the efficient sizes of enterprises, and worked on delivered price systems, vertical integration, and similar topics.
confused science ideas
Mathematics has no symbols for confused ideas.
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.
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.
return study insight
The main insight learned from interdisciplinary studies is the return to specialization
school years next-year
I attended schools in Seattle through the University of Washington, from which I was graduated in 1931. I spent the next year at Northwestern University.
law discovery originals
Stigler's Law: No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.
airports missing too-much
If you never miss a plane, you’re spending too much time at the airport.
men numbers levels
...the number of saintly men has not yet risen to the level where the census makes them a separate statistical category.
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.
two milton economist
All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.
mother paper faces
Friedman stumbled in, late to the seminar as usual and reeking of cigar smoke and whiskey. He hadn't read the paper being presented, and halfway through he just gets up, walks up to the podium, socks the mother****er right in the face and takes a piss all over his lecture notes.
mother asking answers
I recall my mother asking in about 1946 what I was and I replied proudly that I was a professor. A decade later she repeated her question and I repeated my answer. "No promotion?" was her comment.