George Stigler Quotes
...it is distressing how often one can guess the answer given to an economic question merely by knowing who asks it.
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.
The main insight learned from interdisciplinary studies is the return to specialization
My teaching began in 1936 at Iowa State College where T. W. Schultz was the department chairman.
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.
Theories are not rejected by cirsumstantial evidence: it takes a theory to beat a theory.
All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.
...the number of saintly men has not yet risen to the level where the census makes them a separate statistical category.
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.
And yet I would not freely exchange my science for those of my fellow laureates. They are forever confined in their professional discussions to the small numbers of their fellow scientists.
I met my wife, Margaret L. Mack, at the University of Chicago. We were married in 1936. She died in 1970.
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.
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.
My main graduate training was received at the University of Chicago from which I received the Ph.D. in 1938.
