A Useful Introduction.

• Author: Carden, Art

George Stigler: Enigmatic Price Theorist of the Twentieth Century

Edited by Craig Freedman

815 pp.; Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

George Stigler: Enigmatic Price Theorist of the Twentieth Century explores what we know about Stigler the man and Stigler the scholar as well as the intellectual and institutional legacy he left behind. I laughed out loud at a problem I know all too well when I read the dedication by the book's editor, economist Craig Freedman, to his "daughters Emily and Nicola who neither know, or care to know, who George Stigler might be." Those of us who do care will find the book to be a very useful companion to Stigler's works and studies of 20th century classical liberal political economy.

Stigler (1911-1991) was a titan of the 20th century economics profession and especially of the vaunted Chicago School of the 1960s and '70s. He grew up in the Seattle suburbs, earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Washington and a master's in business from Northwestern University, and then got his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1938. His long career included stops at Iowa State, Minnesota, Brown, and Columbia before he returned to the University of Chicago in 1958. He wrote a long series of influential books and papers that earned him the Nobel economics prize in 1982.

The man / The book is interesting in that it combines a collection of essays with a series of late-20th century interviews. The editor conducted the interviews with Stigler's student Mark Blaug and his former Chicago colleagues Sherwin Rosen, Ronald Coase, Milton and Rose Friedman, Aaron Director, Stephen Stigler (George's son and a statistician at the University of Chicago), and George's longtime assistant Claire Friedland. The picture of him that emerges is complex and sometimes tragic.

Stigler had a famously sharp wit and was always ready with a joke that usually came at someone's expense. That was emblematic of the famously brutal--some would say toxic--Chicago seminar culture. Some of the interviews, particularly those with the Friedmans, suggest that his caustic wit masked deeper insecurities and kept people at bay. Blaug describes him with some justification as "a bully." He was as competitive in the seminar room as he was on the tennis court and that often got the best of him. The interviews suggest that he was aware of his boorishness; however, he never developed a filter.

One of the ironies of his life and career is that homo economicus, the...