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 purely self-interested, optimizing sociopath who inhabited Stigler’s models, seemed to be noticeably absent from the way he lived. He was generous and warm with his family and those very close to him, but few people were close to him. Friedland, who worked for him for some 33 years, said she never really knew Stigler. In her words,

A student once asked me what was “beneath George Stigler’s hard, sarcastic exterior.” How could I resist answering “A hard, sarcastic interior”? In reality, it was a question I couldn’t answer at the time; it had been only 10 or 15 years that I’d been doing research for, and with, George. Today I think I’d respond “Sarcastic? Well, yes. But hard? No, I don’t think so.” Although I had often said that George was irrationally rational, in certain areas he was irrationally generous.

Race / Here, a digression of sorts is in order. The biographical information and interviews are of interest in part because of some recent controversy regarding Stigler’s views on race. This stems from the circulation of his 1965 article “The Problem of the Negro” that appeared in a Young Americans for Freedom publication. The piece is “cringey,” as one observer pointed out, but the existing body of scholarship on Stigler as well as his own work do not offer much (if anything) to suggest that race played a meaningful role in his ideology, worldview, or economic analysis. Via email, one of his former Chicago colleagues expressed surprise that he even had views on racial matters. The timing of the piece matters, I suspect: it is dated December 1965. That is nine months after the release of The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, also known as the Moynihan Report, which I believe is the basis for Stigler’s article.

His thesis in the article, albeit crudely defended, seems innocuous: self-improvement rather than resentment is the way to overcome historical obstacles. While he apparently “didn’t think that much of” his student Thomas Sowell — a prominent black economist — that does not seem very surprising because he “didn’t think that much of” anyone and was not at all shy about it. Is this a neglected container of spoiled God-knows-what in the back of his intellectual and moral refrigerator? Yes. Is it some sort of hidden key to Stigler’s ideas showing that they need to be completely reinterpreted? I very seriously doubt it. The essay will be useful as a pretext for people to dismiss ideas they already do not like, but I do not think it adds much to our understanding of his work.

The only time race comes up in George Stigler is in the economic historian David Mitch’s discussion of the search for someone to assume the Walgreen Chair for the Study of American Institutions. In vetting Robert Fogel, who eventually replaced him, Stigler consulted a lot of historians to determine whether the controversy over Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s 1974 book Time on the Cross had discredited him. One of the historians Stigler consulted was his Chicago colleague John Hope Franklin, who apparently “got along well” with Fogel but accepted “the arguments of some critics (e.g., [Paul] David, [Peter] Temin, [Richard] Sutch).” Stigler helping lure Fogel back to Chicago might someday be taken by some as evidence of Stigler’s racial animus, but this is speculation about a vein of research that other scholars are still working on. We will know in a few years.

His work / Stigler made important contributions to industrial organization, the economics of information (which he considered his most important work), the economics of regulation, and the history of economic thought.

He is also famous for formulating what we now know as the Coase Theorem, derived from Ronald Coase’s 1960 article “The Problem of Social Cost.” As the essays collected by Freedman argue, what Stigler reported was not really a theorem, and Coase himself argued that it was not really what he had been arguing. (French economist Elodie Bertrand quotes Stigler’s version from the 1966 edition of The Theory of Price: “Under perfect competition, private and social costs will be equal.”) Like Adam Smith, Coase was exploring knotty economic problems embedded in their social contexts. Stigler’s “prudence and prices all the way down” approach certainly clarified some essentials in Coase and Smith; however, it missed the big picture. In this respect, the book’s essays on Stigler as a reader and interpreter of Smith (one by Jeffrey Young and another by David Peart and Sandra Levy), David Ricardo (by Heinz Kurz), and Alfred Marshall (by Neil Hart) are especially illuminating.

The relationship between the Chicago School and the Virginia School gets a welcome treatment, with essays by Gordon Brady and Francesco Forte, Peter Boettke and Rosolino Candela, and Richard Wagner. These chapters, I suspect, are already forming the core of someone’s dissertation on the relationship between Chicago and Charlottesville.

Stigler and Buchanan were both students of Frank Knight at the University of Chicago. One of the interesting puzzles — albeit unresolved, I think — is why Stigler in his article “The Theory of Economic Regulation” builds a public choice argument but without citing or acknowledging any of the obvious contributions that had been developed before. Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action is a notable exception, but (for example) Gordon Tullock’s Nobel-worthy “The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies, and Theft” is conspicuously absent. This seems to undermine the argument of Edward Nik-Khah and Robert Van Horn that there was an “echo chamber” strategy at play during the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s and ’80s.

There is an unresolved puzzle that weaves its way through the book. Stigler certainly had a classically liberal “pre-analytic vision,” to use Joseph Schumpeter’s term, but it is not at all clear why research implicitly assuming that equality is desirable is any less “ideological” than research implicitly assuming that economic liberty is desirable. Nik-Khah and Van Horn argue that the scholars gathered at the first Mont Pelerin Society meeting “were wounded by the Great Depression and its aftermath, culminating in the rise of the welfare state.” This is puzzlingly similar to a lot of other contributions to 20th century intellectual history that put the Great Depression and reaction to the New Deal at the center of the story while ignoring some very large elephants in the room, namely, the fact that the world in 1947 was fresh off the defeat of European fascism (which had waged an outright war of extermination on the Jews) and the triumph of Eurasian communism (which would go on to wage implicit wars of liquidation and starvation in the Soviet Union and China). Perhaps those who joined Friedrich Hayek were right to be concerned that civilization itself hung in the balance.

Conclusion / George Stigler is two books mashed together. Freedman’s essays alone could be extracted, revised, and republished as a standalone volume on Stigler. The collection is not a book to be read straight through: as edited collections tend to do, it suffers from a lot of repetition. The footnotes are long and digressive, and as a member in good standing of the “footnotes are for references only” school of Economical Writing (to borrow from Deirdre McCloskey), I find myself wishing these discussions had been incorporated into the body of the text.

If I can be puckish for a moment: I was intrigued to learn about the intellectual exploits of “Frank Buchanan” (actually, James Buchanan) and the contributions of “Dixon and Stiglitz” (actually, Dixit and Stiglitz). But as Sowell has said, if there is ever a nuclear war, the only survivors will be cockroaches and typographical errors. At 800+ pages, George Stigler will at the very least be useful for fighting off those post-apocalyptic bugs.

But even if nuclear annihilation tarries, people will find the book to be a very useful introduction to and explanation of Stigler’s ideas and the man who generated them. I suspect that future students and scholars looking to better understand him and the Chicago School will start here. If so, they will have made a good choice.