Stigler Quotes & Sayings

If you never miss a plane, you're spending too much time at the airport. — George Stigler

The Chicago Economics Department was in intellectual ferment, although the central issues of the 1930's 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. — George Stigler

Generally there is Stigler's law of Eponymy that says that a scientific notion is never attributed to the right person; in particular, the law is not due to Stigler. — Dennis Lindley

It is distressing how often one can guess the answer given to an economic question merely by knowing who asks it. — George Stigler

According to a 1995 study, a sample of Japanese eighth graders spent 44 percent of their class time inventing, thinking, and actively struggling with underlying concepts. The study's sample of American students, on the other hand, spent less than 1 percent of their time in that state. "The Japanese want their kids to struggle," said Jim Stigler, the UCLA professor who oversaw the study and who cowrote The Teaching Gap with James Hiebert. "Sometimes the [Japanese] teacher will purposely give the wrong answer so the kids can grapple with the theory. American teachers, though, worked like waiters. Whenever there was a struggle, they wanted to move past it, make sure the class kept gliding along. But you don't learn by gliding. — Daniel Coyle

George Stigler Nobel laureate and a leader of Chicago School was asked why there were no Nobel Prizes awarded in the other social sciences, sociology, psychology, history, etc. "Don't worry", Stigler said, "they have already have a Nobel Prize in ... Literature" — Robert Kuttner

Competition is a tough weed, not a delicate flower. — George Stigler

Many thinkers have tried to "naturalize" consumerism in that way, including most social Darwinists, Austrian School economists (Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard), Chicago School economists (George Stigler, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker), Darwinian libertarians, globalization advocates, management gurus, and marketers. Their model (which I call the Wrong Conservative Model, because I think it's wrong, and because it's usually advocated by political conservatives) is: human nature + free markets = consumerist capitalism — Geoffrey Miller

I recall an incident involving the late George Stigler at a conference in Spain in the 1980s. Hearing that I had written a book on reason and natural law, Stigler started to ridicule reason, going so far as to say that there is as much reason in a monkey's antics as in any human act. At that point I asked him whether he was trying to tell me something about how he wrote his books; he gave me a blank stare and stormed out of the room. — Frank Van Dun

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. — George Stigler

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. — George Stigler

The main insight learned from interdisciplinary studies is the return to specialization — George Stigler

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. — George Stigler

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. — George Stigler

After the war, I returned to Minnesota, from which I soon moved to Brown University, and a year later, to Columbia University where I remained from 1947 until 1958. — George Stigler

Jorge Luis Borges understood this. In a fantasy short story published in 1942, "Funes the Memorious," he described a man, Ireneo Funes, who found after an accident that he could remember absolutely everything. He could reconstruct every day in the smallest detail, and he could even later reconstruct the reconstruction, but he was incapable of understanding. Borges wrote, "To think is to forget details, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes there were only details. — Stephen M. Stigler

My main graduate training was received at the University of Chicago from which I received the Ph.D. in 1938. — George Stigler

All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman. — George Stigler

George Stigler was a delightful correspondent. In a letter from London in 1948, after remarking on the inconvertibility of the pound and the inedible, still-rationed food, he concluded, So here I am losing weight and gaining pounds. — Milton Friedman

As George J. Stigler said of some of his fellow Nobel Laureates, they issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometimes on no other basis. — Thomas Sowell

I met my wife, Margaret L. Mack, at the University of Chicago. We were married in 1936. She died in 1970. — George Stigler

The number of saintly men has not yet risen to the level where the census makes them a separate statistical category. — George Stigler

In 1958, I came to Chicago where I have remained. — George Stigler

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. — George Stigler

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. — George Stigler

Two years later, I went to the University of Minnesota from which I was on leave for several years during the war as a member of Statistical Research Group at Columbia University. — George Stigler

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. — George Stigler

Stigler's Law: No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. — George Stigler

There is only one social science and we are its practitioners — George Stigler

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. — George Stigler

I started working and publishing in price theory by 1938. — George Stigler

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. — George Stigler

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. — George Stigler

Beware of the problem of testing too many hypotheses; the more you torture the data, the more likely they are to confess, but confessions obtained under duress may not be admissible in the court of scientific opinion. — Stephen Stigler

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. — George Stigler

My teaching began in 1936 at Iowa State College where T. W. Schultz was the department chairman. — George Stigler

It was in the 1960s that I began the detailed study of public regulation. — George Stigler

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. — George Stigler

Mathematics has no symbols for confused ideas. — George Stigler

Am I to admire a man who injures me in an awkward and mistaken attempt to protect me, and to despise a man who to earn a good income performs for me some great and lasting service? — George J. Stigler

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. — George Stigler