George Stigler Quotes

It's not rocket science. It's social science.

The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth.

Man, the molecule of society, is the subject of social science.

Social science virtually abhors the event. Not without reason; the short-term is the most capricious and deceptive form of time.

Economics is a social science, not a physical science.

There is no such thing as economics, only social science applied to economic problems.

I realized that you could formulate theories about human and social phenomena in language and pictures and whatever you wanted on the computer, and you didn't have to go through this straitjacket, adding a lot of numbers.

I had always looked down on sociology as this arriviste discipline. It didn't have the noble history of English and history as a subject. But once I had a little exposure to it, I said, 'Hey, here's the key. Here's the key to understanding life and all its forms.'

I recognized that … there was a science of society as well as botany.

I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography.

Study, analyse the social structure - that's always far more effective than moralising.

History is the shank of the social sciences.

Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.

I think of myself as a social scientist. In order to get hired and to get promoted, we're forced to declare a disciplinary and sub-disciplinary specialty, so I am a psychologist and I am a social psychologist within that. But I think the exciting thing is to think about the social sciences in general and the nature of society. It's one of the hardest things to think about, because our brains aren't designed to think about these emergent entities. We're not good at it.

I will confess that I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for the mind of an ant.

Behind every rational and irrational force in human society there is a social mechanism which determines where it is to appear and what forms it is to take.

Sociology is really in trouble as a field. I can tell you, because I've known young people who have wanted to go into it, and they have been uniformly advised, if you are a free thinker, stay away from sociology.

I love to study people, and that's basically what sociology is.

Economics is counterintuitive. It just is.

Economics has increasingly become the science of human behavior in general, and it's all the more unlikely to think that it can possibly be value-free - and, in fact, it isn't. Economics rests on un-argued assumptions that need to be examined.

Economics is in many respects the queen of the soft sciences. It's expected to be better than the rest. It's my view that economics is better at the multi-disciplinary stuff than the rest of the soft science. And it's also my view that it's still lousy.

People behave agentically, but they produce theories that afford people very little agency.

I am saying that the economic approach provides a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behaviour

Man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical.

I have spent much time in the study of the abstract sciences; but the paucity of persons with whom you can communicate on such subjects disgusted me with them. When I began to study man, I saw that these abstract sciences are not suited to him, and that in diving into them, I wandered farther from my real object than those who knew them not, and I forgave them for not having attended to these things. I expected then, however, that I should find some companions in the study of man, since it was so specifically a duty. I was in error. There are fewer students of man than of geometry.