George Stigler Quotes About Economists

• 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

  Philosophy, Years, Law

• 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

  Science, Intense, Sociology

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

  George Stigler

  Two, Milton, Economist

• 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

  Mother, Faces, Lectures

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

  George Stigler

  Return, Study, Insight

• 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

  Native Language, People, Citizens

• 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

  Competition, Challenges, Citizens

  Nobel Banquet Speech, www.nobelprize.org. 1982.

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