George J. Stigler (1911–1991): Scholar, Father, Dissertation Advisor, Referee, Textbook Writer and Policy Analyst

I Moss on Stigler as a Historical Subject GEORGE JOSEPH STIGLER is an obvious subject target for historians of 20th-century economic thought. His Theory of Competitive Price (1942) helped shape the development of microeconomics after World War II and his remarkable topics for analysis produced seminal contributions to important and rapidly growing fields such as the economics of industrial organization, the economics of regulation, public choice economics and the economics of information. He was recognized for his contributions to economics, especially the economics of information, by the award of the Nobel Prize in economics in 1982. Since the Nobel Prize there has been an abundance of biographical and historical material about Stigler, including his own brief autobiography, Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist (Stigler 1988a) and the entry in Blaug's Who's Who in Economics (Blaug 1986). A useful bibliography of Stigler's writings has been prepared by Ms. Vicky M. Longawa and published in the Journal of Political Economy (Longawa 1993). In this article we shall not try to reproduce all of this information. Also, we shall not try to touch on all aspects of his life and intellectual contribution. We must cover just a few of the biographer's subject areas, hopefully in a novel way. Still, something "extra" does need to be introduced into any conversation about Stigler and his legacy. In 1989, Professor D. N. McCloskey recalled a conversation with Stigler that was "especially eye opening to an associate professor [who was] beginning at last in 1978 to doubt the epistemological claims of positivism" (McCloskey 2001:160). McCloskey (the "younger colleague") recalled the incident as follows: George was holding forth on the merits of behaviorist theories of voting in which people are said to vote their pocketbooks. His younger colleague, who had just read Brian Barry's devastating attack on such models [1978] and for ten years had been teaching first-year graduate students about the small man in the large market, following George's exposition in The Theory of Price, noted that people would be irrational to go to the polls in any case. Since the people were nuts to begin with, it would be strange if they voted their pocketbooks when they got inside the booth. The argument struck a nerve, and Stigler became as was his custom abusively positivistic, declaring loudly that all that mattered were the observable implications. (McCloskey 2001:160). As a result of this encounter and others with the Chicago school economists in residence circa 1980, McCloskey concluded that Chicago's version of positivism had become a negative element in economics. Stigler was the catalyst in purging McCloskey of his "Chicago school methodology" (McCloskey 2001). The McCloskey anecdote is a disturbing one and the image it portrays of a stern, humorless taskmaster is not the memory many others have of Stigler. I suppose some of the material in this article can be said to "set the record straight" and offer a more balanced and nuanced portrait of Stigler. Still, Warren Samuels recalls a Stigler who was "the principal, but by no means the sole, author of absolutist formulations of neoclassical doctrine" (see below, section VIII). The collaborators on this piece include a family member, a Ph.D. candidate who wrote under Stigler, colleagues, co-authors and several of the younger generation of historians of economic thought who offer appraisals of Stigler's influence both on the profession and the professional literature. But the purpose of this article is not hagiography but to offer evidence for deeper interpretation and understanding. What emerges here is a much more interesting portrait of a justly famous economist. This is not to deny McCloskey's perception of a dogmatic Chicago school headed by a closed-minded Stigler, but against this perception we have Claire Friedland's recollection that in his "later years" Stigler began to consider the possibility of the legitimacy of the gains obtained by special interest group legislation. …