George J. Stigler

George Stigler graduated with a B.A. from Washington University in 1931 obtained his M.B.A. from Northwestern the following year. The climax of his studies were at the University of Chicago, where he obtained his Ph.D and initiated an extremely successful academic career. He taught at Iowa State College, Minnesota, and spent a year at Brown, while working the duration of WWII doing statistical research at Columbia University.

His early career interests included price theory, linear programming, vertical integration, delivered price systems, and more. He was also on Staff at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he studied the service industries and the behavior of industrial prices. Although, arguably his most notable field of study was public regulation. He concluded that public regulation has little influence and is usually detrimental to consumer interests. He is also known for developing his Theory of Economic Regulation (sometimes called Stigler's theory). He wrote a theoretical article in 1971 that changed the way economists analyze government regulation, and all throughout his career and in all of his works he constantly stressed the importance of information over broader theories and ideas.

I did not know of George Stigler's exact role in economic history, although Stigler's theory seemed vaguely familiar as I was doing research. I believe his work is important because there are a lot of possibilities and conclusions to be made analyzing data and information rather than broader discussions and theories. Reading about his work in public regulation was also interesting, specifically focusing on the harmful effect of regulation on consumers.

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanSeptember 6, 2019 at 1:30 PM

    I believe that George Stigler is considered the father of "information economics" which we will be quite concerned with in our course. He set the path for future economic research with his paper, The Economics of Information (1961).

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