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.

I started working and publishing in price theory by 1938.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

In 1958, I came to Chicago where I have remained.

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.

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.

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.

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

Theories are not rejected by cirsumstantial evidence: it takes a theory to beat a theory.

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.

If you never miss a plane, you’re spending too much time at the airport.

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.

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