George Stigler

Stigler is the second generation of immigrants. He was born in Seattle, Washington, to parents who had obtained citizenship. His father was a first-generation German immigrant, and his mother was a first-generation Hungarian immigrant. Stigler received a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Washington School of Business in Seattle (1931), a master's degree in business administration from Northwestern University (1932), and a doctorate from the University of Chicago (1938).

Stigler's teaching career began at the University of Idaho, where he served as an assistant professor from 1936 to 1938. He taught at the University of Minnesota from 1938 to 1946, where he was promoted to full professor in 1941.

In 1946, Stigler learned that his alma mater, the University of Chicago, wanted him to be interviewed for a professorship, and another professorship candidate who came with him on the same day was Milton Friedman. As a result, Friedman was awarded the only professorship. Unsuccessful, Stigler came to Brown University to teach briefly for a year until 1947. He taught at Columbia University from 1947 to 1958, during which time Stigler's economic ideas matured. In 1958, there was another shortage of professors at the University of Chicago. Stigler was finally hired as a full professor, and then experienced more than two decades of Chicago economics leading the way at the University of Chicago. In 1977, Stigler founded the Center for the Study of the Economy and the State at the University of Chicago and served as its director. Stigler retired from the economics department in 1981, but continued to serve as the director of the research center until his death in 1991.

During his early academic career, Stigler was interested in many areas of economics. In 1938, he embarked on research on price theory and published a book. He published his first paper,"Social Welfare and Differential Prices," in the prestigious Journal of Political Economy at the University of Chicago. Soon after, he began to write his first monograph,"Competitive Price Theory"(1942). In 1946, he launched "Price Theory".

At that time, he had just settled in Ames, completed his doctoral thesis, and received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1938. By this time, he had been teaching at the University of Idaho for two years. At this point, Frederick Garver invited him to take a job at the University of Minnesota, and he accepted. Here, he works with Dr. Francis and Arthur Magit.

In 1947, Stigler began an 11-year teaching career at the University of Colombia.

In 1958, Mr. Stigler was appointed professor of the Charl R. Walgreens Lecture on American Institutions at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Thus began his long career at the university, where, along with Milton Friedman, he helped lead the Chicago School of Free Market Economics, known for its emphasis on monetarism and the diminished role of government.

From 1957 to 1958, Mr. Stigler left the University of Chicago for a year of research at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, Calif., where he spent what he recalls as a "brilliant year" with Kenneth Arrow, Melvin Reid, Milton Friedman and Robert Solow, all of whom, with the exception of Mr. Reid, were later Nobel laureates in economics.

Stigler served as Vice Chairperson of the Security Investment Protection Commission from 1971 to 1974, and as an adviser to President Richard Nixon on regulatory reform from 1969 to 1970, which provided him with the opportunity to apply his scholarship on regulatory management to public policy. In the years that followed, a series of important academic appointments and job titles were made possible by the recognition of his achievements. In 1964, he was elected President of the American Economic Association. In 1974, he became editor of the prestigious journal Political Economy. A year later, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

After 1977, he served as the head of the National Center for Economic Research at the University of Chicago. Since 1947, he has been a senior researcher at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 1982, Stigler received the Nobel Prize in Economics, the highest honor in economics.

At the age of 70, Mr. Stigler entered a comfortable semi-retirement, with more time for the hobbies he loved: collecting books, photography, woodcutting and playing golf. He gave up his university leadership, but was named the Charles W. Walgreens Distinguished Professor Emeritus.

George Stigler believed that it was a pleasant and uniquely stimulating life to concentrate on being an intellectual and devote himself to "boring" economic research. He deliberately avoided all non-academic occupations and activities that could take him away from academia. He gained endless joy from teaching, research and academic exchanges, and also left many valuable works. To sum up, they include: "The Behavior of Industrial Prices"(Cooperation, 1970),"Modern Man and His Companies"(1971),"Citizens and the State"(1975),"Modern Man and His Companies"(1971),"Citizens and the State"(1975),"Economists as Preachers, and Other Papers"(1982).