George Stigler, R I P

THE OBITUARIES identify Professor George J. Stigler of the University of Chicago as a Nobel Prize-winning economist. He was that and more. He did the work of a scholar and a teacher, both superbly. Those of us privileged to have known Stigler as his students or his colleagues will never forget his quick and sharp wit, which was the wit of distilled wisdom, not mere cleverness with words. Of those Nobel Prize winners who make grandiloquent statements on things they know nothing about, Stigler said drily that they "issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometimes on no other basis."

Stigler's classroom was an intellectual Demolition Derby where fashionable can't and tempting fallacies were sent crashing to the junk heap. For Stigler, economics was not some magic formula to produce personal fortune or national miracles. Economics was, for him, a body of knowledge "that prevents hopeless but costly endeavors." He was not looking for "solutions." He was exposing the dangerous illusion that politicians can produce a free lunch. If teaching us how to analyze and warning us against free lunches seems like a somewhat limited role for economics, it was in keeping with Stigler's view of "our disgraceful ignorance of the effects of past policies" and his conviction that "only a tiny set of policies have been studied with even moderate care."

The era spanned by Stigler's life included two decades-the 1930s and the 1960s-marked by passionate delusions, in economics as elsewhere. He specialized in two areas where those delusions were especially prevalent, industrial organization and the history of economics, so his skepticism was especially needed.

"Monopoly has become as popular a subject in economics as sin has been in religion," Stigler said. The analogy was apt, for much that has been said about monopoly by economists specializing in industrial organization has been evangelical rather than logical-and demands for evidence have sometimes been considered as shocking as heresy.

Stigler never said much (if anything) about the sacred duty of a scholar to seek the truth rather than notoriety. He simply lived it. That was an old-fashioned virtue that deserves an old-fashioned word: noble. That's more important than Nobel.

-THOMAS SOWELL

COPYRIGHT 1991 National Review, Inc.
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