George Stigler was recognized for his research on the
workings of industry and the role of government regulation in the economy. A great champion of deregulation, his studies
have attacked rent controls, minimum wage laws, and the antitrust laws. He was the first Nobel economist to have
written extensively about the history of economics.
The Nobel Committee recognized Professor Stigler “for his
seminal studies of industrial structures, functioning of markets and causes and
effects of public relation.”
Quotes from George Stigler’s April 1985 lecture at
It is a good rule that
a scientist has only one chance to become successful in influencing his
science, and that is when he influences his contemporaries…So to understand the
conditions under which modern work in economics has emerged, one must look at
the conditions of training and work of the modern scholar. Those conditions are no substitute for
creativity, but they have become an indispensable condition for creativity to
be exercised.
There is good reason
for believing that economics is a social science in quite another sense from
the indisputable one that it concerns itself with mankind in social
relationships. It appears also to be a
social science in the literal sense that it is a science in which it is
difficult to do creative work if one is not in a congenial intellectual
environment.
Additional resources on George
Stigler are available at the Nobel web
site.