George Stigler Quotes

24 quotes in 391 categories

• ...it is distressing how often one can guess the answer given to an economic question merely by knowing who asks it.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• There is only one social science and we are its practitioners
• 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…
• 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…
• My main graduate training was received at the University of Chicago from which I received the Ph.D. in 1938.
• 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…
• 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…
• I started working and publishing in price theory by 1938.
• In 1958, I came to Chicago where I have remained.
• I met my wife, Margaret L. Mack, at the University of Chicago. We were married in 1936. She died in 1970.
• 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…
• 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.
• 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…
• All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman.
• It was in the 1960s that I began the detailed study of public regulation.
• If you never miss a plane, you’re spending too much time at the airport.
• My teaching began in 1936 at Iowa State College where T. W. Schultz was the department chairman.

Browse George Stigler Quotes by Category