Remembrance and appreciation roundtable George J. Stigler : scholar, father, dissertation advisor, referee, textbook writer and policy analyst - 1911-1991

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, July, 2002 by Claire Friendland, Craufurd Goodwin, Claire H. Hammond, J. Daniel Hammond, David Levy, Steven G. Medema, Michele I. Naples, Warren J. Samuels, Stephen M. Stigler

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. Stigler asked by what independent standard could an economist pass judgment on the results. Similar problems involving the distinction between evaluating policies and explaining them are touched on by Levy in his contribution explaining the ways in which Stigler influenced his research. Let us begin the journey.

II

Stigler on Stigler as Father and Mentor

MY FATHER, AS YOU MAY KNOW, had more than a small amount of skepticism about the scientific uses to which historians put biography and autobiography (Stigler 1982a). He had many examples of dubious instances of the use of biography, such as one I would add from statistics: some people have attributed Francis Galton's interest in eugenics to his childless marriage and Ronald Fisher's interest in eugenics to his having had seven children. Try using those data in a regression analysis to predict scientific interests! But George was not entirely consistent on this. [I should pause to explain this familiar form of address: as long as I can remember, I have called my father "George," and as long as I can remember my friends have thought this odd. He encouraged it, on the principle that all his friends called him by his first name, and we were his friends.] Despite these misgivings George read biographies with great apparent interest, and wrote his own autobiography, Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist (Stigler 1988 a). Still, his own was about as impersonal an autobiography as you will find. My wife Virginia typed the manuscript for that book and we were constantly urging him--with no evident success--to put more of himself in the book. I attribute this to the fact that he was essentially a very private person. He practically never spoke about his own feelings. And yet he was reasonably transparent. I think that was a trait of his that made people comfortable being around him; they knew where they stood, there was no misrepresentation. At least it made some people comfortable--there were exceptions. I understand that once Gardner Means came up to him at a meeting and exclaimed, "George, I'm not as dumb as you think I am!" For once, George was left without a reply.