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| 经济学家日历：乔治·斯蒂格勒 |
作者： 发布时间：2007-11-25 15:28:03 来源： 点击数：77
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George Joseph Stigler
(January 17, 1911 — December 1, 1991)
自由市场的坚定捍卫者
陈桂玲
斯蒂格勒1911年1月11日生于美国华盛顿州雷登的西雅图郊区。在美国经济大萧条即将到来之时，他进入了华盛顿大学，并于1931年获得工商管理学学士学位。大学毕业后，来到西北大学攻读硕士学位，毕业后，斯蒂格勒进入芝加哥大学。1936年离开芝加哥来到艾姆斯地区的依阿华州立大学任助理教授。
在斯蒂格勒的早期学术生涯中，他对经济学的许多领域都感兴趣。在1938年，他着手于价格理论方面的研究并发表著作。他在芝加哥大学负有盛名的《政治经济学》杂志上发表了他的第一篇论文《社会福利和差额价格》。不久，他就着手撰写他的第一本专著《竞争价格理论》（1942）。1946年，他又推出了《价格理论》。
当时，他刚刚定居于艾姆斯，在那儿他完成了博士论文，于1938年获得芝加哥大学哲学博士学位。这时，他已在依阿华州立大学任教两年。这时，弗雷德里克·加弗邀请他去明尼苏达州大学任职，他接受了。在这里，他与弗朗西斯博士和阿瑟·马吉特共事。
1947年，斯蒂格勒开始了在哥伦比亚大学长达11年之久的教学生涯。
1958年，斯蒂格勒被任命为芝加哥大学商业研究生院美国制度查尔·R沃尔格林讲座的教授。这样，他就开始了在这所大学的长期任职生涯。在此期间，他与米尔顿·弗里德曼一道，领导了主张自由市场经济的芝加哥学派，这个学派以重视货币主义和降低政府作用而闻名于世。 1957～1958年，斯蒂格勒离开了芝加哥大学赴加利福尼亚斯坦福大学的行为科学高等研究中心进行为期一年的研究工作，他与肯尼斯·阿罗、梅尔文·里德、米尔顿·弗里德曼和罗伯特·索洛一起度过了他在回忆中所称的“辉煌的一年”。这些人中除里德外，后来全是诺贝尔经济学奖获得者。
斯蒂格勒在1971～1974年担任安全投资保护委员会副主席，1969～1970年担任尼克松总统的法规管理改革顾问，这使他有机会将他在法规管理上的学术成果应用于公共政策。 在以后的日子里，一系列重要的学术任命和职务头衔接踵而来，这是由于他的成就被世人赏识。1964年，他被选为美国经济协会主席。1974年，他成为享有盛名的《政治经济学》杂志的编辑。一年后，他被选为美国全国科学院成员。
1977年后任芝加哥大学国家经济研究中心负责人。自1947年开始，一直兼任国家经济研究局的高级研究员。1982年，斯蒂格勒获得了经济学家的最高荣誉诺贝尔经济学奖。
在70岁的这一年，斯蒂格勒进入了安逸的半退休生活，他拥有了较多的时间从事他所喜欢的业余爱好：收集书籍、摄影、木刻和打高尔夫球。他放弃了大学的领导岗位，被命名为查尔斯·W沃尔格林杰出荣誉退休教授。
斯蒂格勒是芝加哥学派在微观学方面的代表人物，他是信息经济学的创始人之一，他认为消费者在获得商品质量、价格和购买时机的信息成本过大，使得购买者既不能，也不想得到充分的信息，从而造成了同一种商品存在着不同价格。斯蒂格勒认为这是不可避免的、正常的市场现象，并不需要人为的干预。斯蒂格勒的观点更新了微观经济学的市场理论中关于一种商品只存在一种价格的假定。在研究过程中，斯蒂格勒还把这种分析延伸到劳动市场。这些研究开创了一个被称“信息经济学”的一个新的研究领域。
斯蒂格勒的另一贡献是对社会管制政策的精辟批评，他力图论证“看不见的手”在当代仍可获得良好的效果，而政府管制则常常不能达到预期的效果。他主张实行自由市场制度，反对垄断和国家干预。他是被称为“管制经济学”的新的重要研究领域的主要创始人。弗里德曼赞誉斯蒂格勒是“以经济分析方法来研究法律与政治问题的开山祖师”。
主要学术贡献
对经济管制问题的研究
从二十世纪六十年代初期开始，斯蒂格勒就对一些公共管制政策进行研究，诸如：各州的公用事业委员会对电价的管制、证券管理委员会对发行新股的管制以及反托拉斯法等。斯蒂格勒之所以会从事这方面的研究，是因为斯蒂格勒对经济学界普遍的做法——把法律条文视同实务运作——深表怀疑。斯蒂格勒的研究发现常常颇令人诧异：电力事业的管制并没有帮助到家庭用户；而对发行新股的管理，也并没有帮助到购买这些股票的孤儿寡妇。
斯蒂格勒直到很晚才提出了一个最明显的问题：为什么会有公共管制？斯蒂格勒尝试从不同团体的成本效益来看问题。这样的分析法，显然和主流的政治学研究方法不符。后者认为，引进管制政策，只是单纯地表示立法当局回应高涨的公众需求，以保障公共利益。而追溯公共需求的起源、则是因为某种社会之恶的存在与滋长，导致力主改革的人士希望唤起社会大众的注意。然而这种所谓的“公共利益”理论，难以说明保护性关税或是农村方案等措施，更无法解释政策制定的时机，例如，为何社会安全制度会在二十世纪三十年代开始实施，而不是十九世纪九十年代或二十世纪五十年代？
斯蒂格勒在经济管制的研究工作，和其他学者有较密切的关系，这是和斯蒂格勒在信息研究上的不同之处。唐斯、布坎南以及塔洛克等人早就开始致力于将经济学的逻辑大量应用到政治学的研究上，但斯蒂格勒的研究方法和他们不同，主要的差异是斯蒂格勒非常强调实证导向。
决定企业的效率规模的因素，就是一个有趣的例子。经济学者一直尝试为每一产业的厂商找出所谓的最有效率的规模，他们所使用的方法有三种：①直接比较不同规模企业的各项可见成本；②直接比较不同规模企业的投资报酬率；③依据技术资讯，预估成本函数。这三种方法都有严重的缺失，除了资料取得的问题外，也常存在一些逻辑上的问题。
斯蒂格勒的解决之道，是诉诸于达尔文式的方法，其实阿尔顾也曾经用过类似的方法。斯蒂格勒的基本论点是：假如想知道老虎和豹何者为强，只要把它们关在同一个笼子里，几个小时后再回来看看就好了。同样地，只要看每个产业中能够竞争的厂商究竟规模如何，也就可以推论出效率规模——这就是所谓的生存者方法。
这种方法似乎很直截了当，后来斯蒂格勒发现小弥尔这位优秀的经济学前辈也曾提出相似的看法。但是这种方法有很长一段时间遭到强力的反对。斯蒂格勒的研究报告是在国家经济研究局任职期间撰写的，但当时他们不愿意出版，可能就是因为争议太大了。
斯蒂格勒认为要发现新事物，并没有一种完全可靠的方法，但假如真有，那么绝对可以发现。在斯蒂格勒看来，弗里德曼卓越的消费函数理论，乃是产生自一堆可观察资料所呈现的谜题，而阿罗著名的不可能理论，则是源自对社会决策过程的深入思考。
信息经济学
斯蒂格勒对经济学作出的最重要贡献，无疑是在信息经济学（information theory）这方面。他的整个观念构思的起源，倒并非不满意经济理论通常总是假设经济体系里的各个角色对市场与技术等都具备完整的知识。他所在意的是，经济理论中未曾解释为何几乎每一项产品或劳务，在一特定的时点上，都出现多元而非单一价格。
根据斯蒂格勒个人的观察，包括部分来自实施反托拉斯法产品的价格资料，即使是可以认定为同质性的产品，仍存在着相当大的价格差异。钱伯霖产品差异性的说法，似乎是最顺理成章的解释，但此说并无法适用于汽车零售市场中同款车型以及烟煤等产品上。除了产品外观近似的考察外，有关价格的变动，乃至造成价格分歧之因，似乎均无法从独占性竞争理论中导出有意义的实证预测。
因此斯蒂格勒想到，是信息的昂贵造成了价格的差异。收集资讯不可以分文不花，甚至还得加上交通成本。为了买一款车而走访8家甚至10家的汽车经销商，可能要花上一整天的时间，还得加上交通成本。为了跑第二家超市比较价格，可能需要多花20分钟，而对一个美国成年人来说，20分钟的平均价值可能是3美元左右。
从买方寻求最低价格或卖方寻求最高价格的理论中，斯蒂格勒演绎出许多的推论。很明显地，价格差异的程度与平均价格之比，会随着产品价格增高而降低，因为搜寻资讯的成本不会因商品价格较高而等比例地提高。汽车价格的离散程度相对于其平均价格，应该会比微波炉来得小。同样地，知识的价值也会随着时间而消退，因此可以预期，经常重复购买的产品，比起同样价值但不常购买的产品，其价格分歧的现象会来得较小。为搜寻资讯所投注的心力，也与居住在某一地区时间的长短有关，因此，观光客常要比当地人付出更高的价格才能买到同样的产品。
斯蒂格勒把这项理论应用到劳动市场，发现此理论也有助于解释许多观察到的工资形态。斯蒂格勒还将信息应用于完全不同的问题，主要是针对寡头垄断者之间的勾结，重点是要辨别出他们背离勾结协定的现象。斯蒂格勒引用的是可观察到的数量，而非观察不到的交易价格，用以辨别他们之间暗中较劲的行为。斯蒂格勒也尝试从这样的观点来看广告的功能，这和传统经济学者对广告持敌视的态度，可以说是有很大的不同。
在往后的20年间，经济学的领域里出现了形形色色的信息问题。有一段时间，似乎所有经济学期刊的论文，都非得冠上“不对称信息”。然而这方面的研究课题，仍然取之不竭，如政治信息的问题研究。早期经济学界几乎没有任何有关信息经济学的文献，所以信息经济学可以说是斯蒂格勒的创见。
著作点击
乔治·斯蒂格勒认为专心地做一个知识分子，投身于“枯燥”的经济学研究是一件惬意并具独特刺激性的生活，他有意避开能使他离开学术的一切非学术的职业和活动。他从教学研究和学术交流中获得了无穷的乐趣，也留下许多有价值的著作。
归纳一下有：
《生产和分配理论》（1941）；
《竞争价格理论》（1942）；
《价格理论》（1946年版，1952年版，1964年版）；
《美国的家庭仆人》（1947）；
《产出和就业的趋势》（1947）；
《教育事业的就业和报酬》（1950）；
《联邦政府的价格统计》（1961）；
《知识分子和市场》（1962）；
《关于国家的正当经济作用的对话》（合作，1963）；
《制造业的资本和报酬率》（1963）；
《经济学史论文集》（1965）；
《产业的组织》（合作，1968）；
《工业价格的行为》（合作，1970）；
《现代人和他的公司》（1971）；
《公民和国家》（1975）；
《作为传道士的经济学家及其他论文》（1982）。
（来源：《解读诺贝尔经济学大师》现代出版社）
George Joseph Stigler(January 17, 1911 — December 1, 1991)
By Milton Friedman
I CANNOT PRETEND TO objectivity in writing about George Stigler. For nearly sixty years he was either my closest friend or one of my closest friends. My debt to him, both personal and professional, is beyond measure. Despite deep sadness at his death, like so many others who knew him, I cannot think of him without an inadvertent smile rising to my lips. He was as quick of wit as of mind, and his wit always had a point. His occasional humorous articles--such as "A Sketch of the History of Truth in Teaching" (Stigler, 1973)--have become classics and demonstrate that had he, like an earlier Chicago Ph.D. in economics, Stephen Leacock, chosen to become a professional humorist as well as an economist, he would have achieved no less fame in the one field than in the other.
George Stigler was one of the great economists of the twentieth--or any other--century, with a gift for writing matched among modern economists only by John Maynard Keynes. Intellectual history was his first field of specialization. It remained a lasting love and provided a rich seedbed for his scientific work. A deep understanding of the ideas of the great economists of the past gave him a strong foundation on which to build an analysis of contemporary issues. Few economists have so consistently and successfully combined economic theory with empirical analysis, or ranged so widely. Stigler regarded economic theory, in the words of Alfred Marshall, as "an engine for the discovery of concrete truth," not as a subject of interest in its own right, a branch of mathematics.
PERSONAL HISTORY
George Stigler was born January 17, 1911, in Renton, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. He was the only child of Joseph and Elizabeth Hungler Stigler, who had separately migrated to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, his father from Bavaria, his mother from what was then Austria-Hungary. George writes that his "father had been a brewer until prohibition drove that activity underground. Thereafter, he tried a variety of jobs," finally entering the real estate market. "My parents bought rundown places, fixed them up, and sold them. By the time I was sixteen, I had lived in sixteen different places in Seattle. But my parents had a comfortable if nomadic existence" (Stigler, 1988, pp. 9-10).
George went to public schools and then to the University of Washington, all in Seattle, receiving a B.A. in 1931. "An insatiable and utterly indiscriminate reader," he "got lots of good grades" at the University of Washington. He said that, when he graduated from college, he had "no thought of an academic career"; it was the depression and jobs in business were scarce, so he applied for and was awarded a fellowship at Northwestern University for graduate study in the business school, receiving an M.B.A. in 1932 (Stigler, 1988, p. 15). At Northwestern he developed an interest in economics and decided on an academic career. He returned to the University of Washington for one further year of graduate study, and then received a tuition scholarship to study economics at the University of Chicago. There he found an intense intellectual atmosphere that captivated him. Chicago became his intellectual home for the rest of his life, as a student from 1933 to 1936, a faculty member from 1958 to his death in 1991, and a leading member of and contributor to the "Chicago School" throughout. He received his Ph.D. in 1938.
At Chicago, Stigler was particularly influenced by Frank H. Knight, under whom he wrote his dissertation--a noteworthy feat, since only three or four students ever managed to complete a dissertation under Knight in his twenty-eight years on the Chicago faculty. Stimulating and influential in both economic analysis and social philosophy, Knight was a perfectionist and tended to inhibit students who came under his influence. It is a mark of Stigler's character and drive that he never succumbed to that aspect of Knight's influence; rather, he imbibed what he described as Knight's "devotion to the pursuit of knowledge . . . a sense of unreserved commitment to 'truth'" (Stigler, 1988, pp. 17-18).
The other faculty members whose influence George stressed were Jacob Viner, who taught economic theory and international economics; John U. Nef, economic historian; and their younger colleague Henry Simons, who became a close personal friend and whose A Positive Program for Laissez Faire greatly influenced Stigler and many of his contemporaries.
"At least as important to me," wrote George, "as the faculty were the remarkable students I met at Chicago," and he goes on to list W. Allen Wallis; the author of this memoir; Kenneth Boulding and Robert Shone from Great Britain; Sune Carlson from Sweden; Paul Samuelson; and Albert G. Hart--all of whom subsequently had distinguished careers (Stigler, 1988, pp. 23-25).
I overlapped George at Chicago for one year, 1934-35, during which he, W. Allen Wallis, and I formed what proved to be a lifelong friendship. As it happened, all three of our future spouses were also students at Chicago. George was to marry Margaret Mack, always known as Chick, who was majoring in social science. Allen would marry Anne Armstrong, an art history major, and I married Rose Director, whose major was economics. We soon formed a sextuple whose lives were intertwined from then on.
In 1936 George accepted an appointment as an assistant professor at Iowa State College (now University), and shortly thereafter was married to Margaret "Chick" Mack. George and Chick had three sons: Stephen, a professor of statistics at the University of Chicago; David, a corporate lawyer; and Joseph, a businessman. The family suffered a tragic loss in 1970, when Chick died unexpectedly, without any advance warning. George never remarried.
George accepted an appointment at the University of Minnesota in 1938 and then went on leave in 1942 to work first at the National Bureau of Economic Research and later at the Statistical Research Group of Columbia University, a group directed by Allen Wallis that was engaged in war research on behalf of the armed services. When the war ended in 1945, George returned to the University of Minnesota, but he remained only one year, leaving in 1946 to accept a professorship at Brown University. That simple statement conceals a traumatic experience. In George's words: "In the spring of 1946 I received the offer of a professorship from the University of Chicago and, of course, was delighted at the prospect. The offer was contingent upon approval by the central administration after a personal interview. I went to Chicago, met with the president, Ernest Colwell--because Robert Hutchins was ill that day--and I was vetoed! I was too empirical, Colwell said, and no doubt that day I was. So the professorship was offered to Milton Friedman, and President Colwell and I had launched the Chicago School" (Stigler, 1988, p. 40). It speaks volumes for George's character that the incident never cast the slightest shadow on our friendship.
In 1946 George and I were two of the thirty-six participants at a conference in Switzerland convened by Friedrich A. Hayek to discuss the dangers to a free society. The Mont Pelerin Society was founded at that conference and has since grown and flourished, providing a forum for members from all over the world to discuss the issues involved in achieving and maintaining political and economic freedom. An active member of the society until his death, George served as its president from 1976 to 1978.
After a year at Brown, George moved to Columbia, where he remained until 1958, despite several attempts by Theodore Schultz, chairman of the Chicago Department of Economics, to bring him to Chicago. In 1958 Allen Wallis, then dean of the University of Chicago business school, persuaded him to accept the Charles R. Walgreen professorship of American institutions. George remained at Chicago for the rest of his life. At Chicago he became an editor of the Journal of Political Economy; established the Industrial Organization Workshop, which achieved recognition as the key testing ground for contributions to the field of industrial organization; and in 1977 founded the Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, serving as its director until his death.
In the academic year 1957-58, George was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. From 1971 to his death, George was a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and spent part of almost every year at Hoover.
George was president of the American Economic Association in 1964, and of the History of Economics Society in 1977. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1975. He received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1982 "for his seminal studies of industrial structures, functioning of markets and causes and effects of public regulation." He received the National Medal of Science from Ronald Reagan in 1987.
George's governmental activities included service as a member of the attorney general's National Committee to Study the Antitrust Laws, 1954-55; chairman, Federal Price Statistics Review Committee, 1960-61; member, Blue Ribbon Panel of the Department of Defense, 1969-70; vice-chairman, Securities Investor Protection Corporation, 1970-73; co-chairman, Blue Ribbon Telecommunications Task Force, Illinois Commerce Commission, 1990-91.
A word about George as a person: In the nearly six decades of our friendship, I never knew him to do a mean or hurtful or unworthy thing to anyone. An ideal friend in time of trouble, he would go to any lengths to be helpful.
He always appeared casual and unhurried, seeming to have ample time for golf (his favorite sport), tennis, bridge, carpentry, photography (his favorite hobby), casual talk with friends, consultations with students, and constructive and detailed criticisms of the writings of his students and academic friends. Yet, he also was incredibly productive, turning out a steady stream of fundamental contributions. Truly, as his son Stephen said at a memorial service, "My father had phenomenal energy."
One feature of George's personality that he did his best to conceal was his extreme personal sensitivity. His smart cracks were in part a way of covering that sensitivity, as was his half-embarrassed laugh. He was as sensitive to others as to himself. The stiletto concealed in his humor was always meant for ideas or policies, never ad hominem--unless "An Economist Plays with Blocs" (1954), his brilliant title for an article on Galbraith's theory of countervailing power, can be so interpreted.
George was a delightful correspondent. Serious and profound discussion never came without an interlarding of amusing comments. In a letter from London in 1948 when he was giving Five Lectures on Economic Problems (1949), after remarking on the inconvertibility of the pound and the inedible, still-rationed food, he concluded, "So here I am losing weight and gaining pounds."
George was an extremely valuable colleague. He provided much of the energy and drive to the interaction among members of the Chicago economics department, business school, and law school that came to be known at the Chicago School. His workshop on industrial organization was an outgrowth of a law school seminar started by Aaron Director, which George cooperated in running when he came to Chicago. His relations were especially close with Aaron, Gary Becker, Richard Posner, Harold Demsetz, and myself, enhancing significantly the scientific productivity of all of us.
STIGLER AS SCIENTIST
History of Thought
Stigler's doctoral dissertation, published as Production and Distribution Theories (1941), was a historical survey of neoclassical theories that remains the definitive study of its subject. That book was followed by a steady flow of perceptive, thoughtful, and beautifully written articles and books interpreting the contributions of his predecessors, some of which were collected in Essays in the History of Economics (1965).
Throughout, Stigler's interest was in "the essential structure of the . . . analytical system" of the authors whose work he examined (Stigler, 1969, p. 220). In judging that analytical system, he placed great stress on its implications for observable phenomena. "Surprising as it may sound, no previous scholar had ever examined the development of the discipline with anything like the same insistence that intellectual progress had to be measured in terms of its ability to generate empirically refutable propositions" (Rosenberg, 1993, p. 836). Stigler tried not only to identify such propositions but to put them to the test, often with data that would have been available to the author whose work he was examining.
During most of Stigler's professional career, the history of economic thought was in the doldrums as a field of study. His writing played a major role in keeping the field alive and enhancing its attractiveness. By the end of his career, the field was flourishing, thanks in part to the example he set and to the new directions for research that he pioneered.
Price Theory
George's first important publication after his doctoral thesis was a textbook, The Theory of Competitive Price (1942), which was followed by revised versions under the title The Theory of Price in 1946, 1952, 1966, and 1987. Its systematic linking of highly abstract theory to observable phenomena is unique among intermediate textbooks in price theory, as is its concise yet rigorous exposition. That feature, according to Thomas Sowell, one of his students, "made it probably the least readable thing Stigler ever wrote. It was not a matter of convoluted writing or confused thought--Stigler was never guilty of either of these common academic sins--but of excessive condensation that required painstakingly slow pondering over every concentrated thought. If the book had been three times as long, it could have been read in half the time. Still, it remained something of a classic, though Stigler himself made many a wry joke about its supposedly meager sales. It was the kind of book that teachers of price theory courses read themselves, while they assigned some other text to the class" (Sowell, 1993, pp. 785-86).
The linkage of fact and theory in his textbook foreshadowed his subsequent scientific work. His many contributions to economic theory were all a byproduct of seeking to understand the real world, and nearly all led to an attempt to provide some quantitative evidence to test the theory or to provide empirical counterparts to theoretical concepts.
An early example of the latter is an article on "The Cost of Subsistence" (1945), which starts, "Elaborate investigations have been made of the adequacy of diets at various income levels, and a considerable number of 'low-cost,' 'moderate,' and 'expensive' diets have been recommended to consumers. Yet, so far as I know, no one has determined the minimum cost of obtaining the amounts of calories, proteins, minerals, and vitamins which these studies accept as adequate or optimum." George then set himself to determine the minimum cost diet, in the process producing one of the earliest formulations of a linear programming problem in economics, for which he found an approximate solution, explaining that "there does not appear to be any direct method of finding the minimum of a linear function subject to linear constraints." Two years later George Dantzig provided such a direct method, the simplex method, now widely used in many economic and industrial applications.
George's approximate solution--very close to the best possible one--cost very little, far less than the standard low-cost adequate diet, demonstrating that those diets could not be defended as "scientific" but reflected mainly allowance for taste and variety rather than simply for nutritive adequacy. The estimated cost of such low-cost diets has subsequently become the basis for the widely used poverty levels of income, assuring the continued significance of this finding.
History of thought apart, George's impact was greatest and most lasting in the three fields that were singled out in the Nobel citation, those he labeled the economics of information, the theory of economic regulation, and the organization of industry.
"The Economics of Information" is the title of a seminal article (Stigler, 1961) that gave birth to an essentially new area of study for economists. In his intellectual autobiography, George termed it, "My most important contribution to economic theory" (Stigler, 1988, pp. 79-80). The article begins, "One should hardly have to tell academicians that information is a valuable resource: knowledge is power. And yet it occupies a slum dwelling in the town of economics. Mostly it is ignored." Stigler then proceeded to illustrate the importance of subjecting information to economic analysis with two examples: the dispersion of prices and the role of advertising (Stigler, 1961, pp. 213-25).
This article is a splendid illustration of several of Stigler's signal virtues: creativity (which he defined as consisting "of looking at familiar things or ideas in a new way"), the capacity to extract new insights about those seemingly familiar things, and the ability to state his main points in a provocative and eminently readable way.
As he wrote in his Nobel memorial lecture,
The proposal to study the economics of information was promptly and widely accepted. Within a decade and a half, the literature had become so extensive and the theorists working in the field so prominent, that the subject was given a separate classification in the Index of Economic Articles, and more than a hundred articles a year are now devoted to the subject.
The absence of controversy was certainly no tribute to the definitiveness of my exposition. . . . The absence of controversy was due instead to the fact that no established scientific theory was being challenged by this work; in fact, all I was challenging was the neglect of a promising subject (Stigler, 1983, p. 539).
The historian of economic thought practicing his craft on himself.
Economic Regulation
Starting from the traditional view that government regulation was instituted for the protection of the public, Stigler was struck by the absence of any quantitative studies of the actual effect of regulation. His first effort to remedy this was directed at the regulation of the prices of public utilities. The result was a 1962 article written jointly with Claire Friedland, his long-time associate, entitled "What Can Regulators Regulate? The Case of Electricity," which concluded that regulation of electric utilities had produced no significant effect on rates charged. This was followed two years later by "Public Regulation of the Securities Market," which concluded that purchasers of new stock issues fared no better (or worse) after the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission than before.1 These articles, like "The Economics of Information," opened a floodgate of empirical studies of the effects of economic regulation. Economists could no longer simply take it for granted that the effects of regulation corresponded to the stated intentions.2
These essays "also posed a basic problem: If regulation does not generally achieve its stated objectives, why have so many agencies been established and kept in existence?" (Schmalensee, 1987, p. 499). "The Theory of Economic Regulation" (Stigler, 1971) presents Stigler's answer to that question. The "central thesis of the article," Stigler wrote, "is that, as a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit." He notes that two "alternative views of the regulation of industry are widely held. The first is that regulation is instituted primarily for the protection and benefit of the public at large or some large subdivision of the public . . . The second view is essentially that the political process defies rational explanation." He then gives example after example to support his own thesis, which by now has become the orthodox view in the profession, concluding, "The idealistic view of public regulation is deeply imbedded in professional economic thought . . . The fundamental vice of such a [view] is that it misdirects attention"--to preaching to the regulators rather than changing their incentives.
Stigler's analysis fed the emerging field that has since come to be called "public choice" economics: the shift from viewing the political market as not susceptible to economic analysis, as one in which disinterested politicians and bureaucrats pursue the "public interest," to viewing it as one in which the participants are seeking, as in the economic market, to pursue their own interest, and hence subject to analysis with the usual tools of economics. The seminal work that deserves much of the credit for launching public choice, The Calculus of Consent, by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, appeared in the same year as the Stigler-Friedland article.
"Smith's Travels on the Ship of State," published in the same year as "The Theory of Economic Regulation," raises the same question on a broader scale. Smith gives self-interest pride of place in analyzing the economic market, but he does not give it the same role in analyzing the political market. Smith's failure to do so constitutes Stigler's main--indeed, nearly only--criticism of the Wealth of Nations, that "stupendous palace erected upon the granite of self interest" (Rosenberg, 1993, p. 835). The same theme pervades many of Stigler's later publications.
The Organization of Industry (1968) is the title of a book whose "main content," as Stigler says in the preface, "is a reprinting of 17 articles I have written over the past two decades [including "Economics of Information] in the area of industrial organization . . . Although the main topics in industrial organization are touched upon, the touch is often light. The ratio of hypotheses to reasonably persuasive confirmation is distressingly high in all of economic literature, and it must be my chief and meager defense that I am not the worst sinner in the congregation." Stigler's main contribution to the field, both in this book and later writing, was the use of empirical evidence to test hypotheses designed to explain features of industrial organization. Article after article combines subtle theoretical analysis with substantial nuggets of empirical evidence, presented so casually as to conceal the care with which the data were compiled and the effort that was expended to determine what data were both relevant and accessible. These articles record the shift in Stigler's views on antitrust--from initial support of an activist antitrust policy to skepticism about even a minimalist policy--that led up to his path-breaking article on "The Theory of Economic Regulation" (Stigler, 1971).
Two other facets of Stigler's contributions deserve mention. First, his essays written for the general public, collected in three volumes, The Intellectuals and the Marketplace (1963), The Citizen and the State (1975), and The Economist as Preacher (1982). "There he [the intelligent layman] will find a potpourri of wit and seriousness blended with a high writing style" (Demsetz, 1982, p. 656). Second, his role as editor and reviewer. "For 19 years Stigler was a very successful editor of the Journal of Political Economy. Under his leadership this journal solidified its high reputation among economists" (Becker, 1993, p. 765). His complete bibliography lists 73 reviews in 24 publications ranging from strictly professional, like the Journal of Political Economy (22) and the American Economic Review (10), to the popular, like the Wall Street Journal (5), and the New York Times (3), and dating from 1939 to 1989.
Stigler's last book, his intellectual autobiography, Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist (1988), is a delight to read. As I described it at the time: "Stigler's memoirs are a gem: in style, in wit, and above all, in substance, they reflect accurately his own engaging personality and his extraordinarily diverse contributions to our science."
STIGLER AS TEACHER
Stigler was also a great teacher. Many who knew him only casually, especially in his younger years, were offended by his wit, which could be biting, and his unerring ability to find just the right response to deflate pomposity and pretentiousness. His students never had that reaction. He was uniformly available, tolerant of their lack of understanding of subtle points, and willing to go to any length to help them. He inspired them by his own high standards and instilled a respect for economics as a serious subject concerned with real problems.
As John Lothian, one of my students who took several courses from Stigler, wrote me after Stigler's death: "His lectures taught me how to think about economics . . . His public persona was one of not suffering fools gladly, but that certainly did not come across in the classroom or in his individual meetings with us to talk over what we were doing in our papers for the course . . . He seemed quite willing to put up with foolishness from us as long as it seemed like we might ultimately get somewhere with what we were doing."3 Another student of Stigler's, Thomas Sowell, wrote: "What Stigler really taught, whether the course was industrial organization or the history of economic thought, was intellectual integrity, analytical rigor, respect for evidence--and skepticism toward the fashions and enthusiasms that come and go" (Sowell, 1993, p. 788).
Stigler supervised many doctoral dissertations at both Columbia and the University of Chicago, a sharp contrast with the record of Frank Knight, under whom Stigler wrote his thesis. His students come close to dominating the field of industrial organization.4
FINAL WORD
I give final word on Stigler to his colleague and fellow recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, Ronald Coase:
He is equally at home in the history of ideas, economic theory, and the study of politics. Even more remarkable is the variety of ways in which he handles a problem; he moves from the marshaling of high theory to aphorism to detailed statistical analysis, a mingling of treatments. . . . It is by a magic of his own that Stigler arrives at conclusions which are both unexpected and important. Even those who have reservations about his conclusions will find that a study of his argument has enlarged their understanding of the problem being discussed and that aspects are revealed which were previously hidden. Stigler never deals with a subject which he does not illuminate. And he expresses his views in a style uniquely Stiglerian, penetrating, lively, and spiced with wit. His writings are easy to admire, a joy to read, and impossible to imitate (Coase, 1991, p. 472).
NOTES
1 Both essays are reprinted in The Citizen and the State: Essays on Regulation, pp. 61-77, 78-100. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
2 Sam Peltzman recalculated the empirical results in the Stigler-Friedland article to correct a mistake in the original. His thoughtful and sophisticated article brings the story up to date (Peltzman, 1993).
3 Personal letter dated Dec. 3, 1991.
4 According to Claire Friedland, Stigler's associate for many years, he served on more than forty thesis committees at Chicago, perhaps forty more at Columbia, and chaired a considerable fraction of those committees.
REFERENCES
Becker, G. S. 1993. George Joseph Stigler. J. Polit. Econ. 101:761-67.
Coase, R. 1991. George J. Stigler. In Remembering the University of Chicago, ed. E. Shils, pp. 469-78. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Demsetz, H. 1982. The 1982 Nobel Prize in economics. Science 218:655-57.
Peltzman, S. 1993. George Stigler's contribution to the economic analysis of regulation. J. Polit. Econ. 101:818-32.
Rosenberg, N. 1993. George Stigler: Adam Smith's best friend. J. Polit. Econ. 101:833-48.
Schmalensee, R. 1987. The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, vol. 4, eds. J. Eatwell, M. Milgate, and P. Newman, pp. 499-500. New York: Stockton Press.
Sowell, T. 1993. A student's eye view of George Stigler. J. Polit. Econ. 101:784-92.
Stigler, G. J. 1961. The economics of information. J. Polit. Econ. 69:213-25.
----. 1969. Does economics have a useful past? Hist. Polit. Econ. 1:217-30.
----. 1971. The theory of economic regulation. Bell J. Econ. Man. Sci. 2:3-21.
---- 1973. A sketch of the history of truth in teaching. J. Polit. Econ. 81:491-95.
---- 1975. The Citizen and the State: Essays on Regulation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
---- 1983. Nobel lecture: The process and progress of economics. J. Polit. Econ. 91:529-45.
---- 1988. Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist. New York: Basic Books.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
1941
Production and Distribution Theories: 1870-1895. New York: Macmillan.
1945
The cost of subsistence. J. Farm Econ. 27:303-14.
1946
The Theory of Price. New York: Macmillan.
1947
Domestic Servants in the United States, 1900-1940. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research.
The kinky oligopoly demand curve and rigid prices. J. Polit. Econ. 55:432-49.
Trends in Output and Employment. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research.
1949
Five Lectures on Economic Problems. New York: Longmans, Green Co.
1950
Employment and Compensation in Education. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research.
1954
The economist plays with blocs. Am. Econ. Rev. Pap. Proc. 44:7-14.
1956
Trends in Employment in the Service Industries. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
1957
With D. M. Blank. Supply and Demand for Scientific Personnel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
1958
The goals of economic policy. J. Bus. 5:169-76.
1963
Capital and Rates of Return in Manufacturing Industries. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
The Intellectual and the Market Place, and Other Essays. New York: Free Press of Glencoe.
1965
Essays in the History of Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1967
Imperfections in the capital market. J. Polit. Econ. 75:287-92.
1968
The Organization of Industry. Homewood, Ill.: Irwin.
1970
Director's law of public income redistribution. J. Law Econ. 13:1-10.
1975
The Citizen and the State: Essays on Regulation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1977
With G. S Becker. De gustibus non est disputandum. Am. Econ. Rev. 67:76-90.
1982
The Economist as Preacher, and Other Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1986
The Essence of Stigler, eds. K. R. Leube and T. G. Moore. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press.
1988
Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist. New York: Basic Books.
1990
The place of Marshall's Principles in the development of economics. In Centenary Essays on Alfred Marshall, ed. J. K. Whitaker, pp. 1-13. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
（来源：http://newton.nap.edu/html/biomems/gstigler.html）
George J. Stigler – Autobiography
I was born in Renton, a suburb of Seattle, Washington, in 1911. I was the only child of Joseph and Elizabeth Stigler, who had separately migrated to the United States at the end of the 19th century, my father from Bavaria and my mother from what was then Austria-Hungary (and her mother was in fact Hungarian). I attended schools in Seattle through the University of Washington, from which I was graduated in 1931. I spent the next year at Northwestern University.
My main graduate training was received at the University of Chicago from which I received the Ph.D. in 1938. The University of Chicago then had three economists - each remarkable in his own way - under whose influence I came. Frank H. Knight was a powerful, sceptical philosopher, at that time vigorously debating Austrian capital theory but gradually losing interest in the details of economic theory1. Jacob Viner was the logical disciplinarian, and equally the omniscient student of the history of economics. Henry Simons was the passionate spokesman for a rational, decentralized organization of the economy. I was equally influenced by two fellow students, W. Allen Wallis and Milton Friedman.
The Chicago Economics Department was in intellectual ferment, although the central issues of the 1930's were very different from those in later times. I had never before encountered minds of that quality at close quarters and they influenced me strongly. For example, Knight supervised my thesis, which was on the history of production and distribution theories from 1870 to 19152. He had a wonderfully critical mind, which, however, was not well suited to intellectual history because he could not understand, let alone excuse, the errors of earlier economists. It was perhaps a decade later before I could read Ricardo through my eyes rather than through Knight's eyes.
My teaching began in 1936 at Iowa State College where T. W. Schultz was the department chairman. Two years later, I went to the University of Minnesota from which I was on leave for several years during the war as a member of Statistical Research Group at Columbia University. After the war, I returned to Minnesota, from which I soon moved to Brown University, and a year later, to Columbia University where I remained from 1947 until 1958. The last year, I was on leave at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, sharing a splendid year with Kenneth Arrow, Milton Friedman, Melvin Reder, and Robert Solow. In 1958, I came to Chicago where I have remained.
In retrospect, I, no doubt, purposely avoided administrative duties, and indeed, almost all non-academic entanglements. I recall my mother asking in about 1946 what I was and I replied proudly that I was a professor. A decade later she repeated her question and I repeated my answer. "No promotion?" was her comment.
Early in my professional life, I found that many areas of economics attracted me. I started working and publishing in price theory by 1938. In 1946, I published an early work on linear programming (The Cost of Subsistence) which solved the problem only approximately; George Dantzig soon presented the exact solution. In the 1940s, I began empirical work on price theory, starting with a test of the kinked oligopoly demand curve theory of rigid prices. In the 1950s, I proposed the survivor method of determining the efficient sizes of enterprises, and worked on delivered price systems, vertical integration, and similar topics.
In this same period, I was on the staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research. There I worked on the service industries and used what may have been the first total factor productivity measure (in Trends in Output and Employment). Later books on scientific personnel (with David Blank), on capital and rates of return in manufacturing, and on the behavior of industrial prices (with James Kindahl) were also done under Bureau sponsorship. It would be remiss to fail to mention the fascinating association I had with that remarkable economist, Arthur F. Burns.
Even before I came to Chicago, I had gotten interested in the existence of dispersion of prices under conditions which economic theory said would yield a single price. That interest culminated in The Economics of Information (1961) and later work - indeed I am about to enter into the study of the extension of this analysis to political behavior.
It was in the 1960s that I began the detailed study of public regulation. My interests were aroused, and my faith in the cliches of the subject destroyed, as so often with other subjects, by the discussions with my friend, Aaron Director. This wonderful man is that rarest of scholars: a clear-headed, imaginative, erudite man who enjoys the task of constructing luminous and original theories but does not even write them down!
Throughout the last 40 years, I have maintained a continued interest in the history of economics (as an aside, I am a diligent book collector; my oldest son is equally active in the history of statistics, and my oldest grandson has an immense collection of comic books - leading some friends to suggest a new gene!). That subject has lost its one time appeal to economists as our science has become more abstract, but my interest has even grown more intense as the questions raised by the sociology of science became more prominent.
I met my wife, Margaret L. Mack, at the University of Chicago. We were married in 1936. She died in 1970. I have three sons, Stephen (a statistician), David (a lawyer), and Joseph (a social worker). We are a close-knit family, and each summer we gather at a cottage on the Muskoka Lakes in Canada.
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1. See my appreciation "In Memoriam: Frank Knight as Teacher," Journal of Political Economy, June 1973.
2. Published as Production and Distribution Theories (Macmillan, 1941). A complete bibliography of my work is given in The Economist as Preacher, University of Chicago Press, 1982
* I wish to thank Gary Becker, Aaron Director, Milton Friedman, and Stephen Stigler for helpful comments.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1982, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1983
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
George J. Stigler died on December 1, 1991
（来源：http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureates/1982/stigler-bio.html）
George J. Stigler (1911-91)
George Stigler was the quintessential empirical economist. Paging through his classic microeconomics text The Theory of Price, one is struck by how many principles of economics are illustrated with real data rather than hypothetical examples. Probably more than any other economist, Stigler deserves credit for getting economists to look at data and evidence.
Stigler's two longest-held positions were at Columbia University (1947-58) and at the University of Chicago (1958-91). From the early fifties to the late sixties, most of his research was in a field called industrial organization. A typical Stigler article laid out a new proposition with clear reasoning and then presented amazingly simple but persuasive data to back up his argument.
Take, for example, Stigler's "A Note on Block Booking." Block booking of movies was the offer of a fixed package of movies to an exhibitor; the exhibitor could not pick and choose among the movies in the package. The Supreme Court banned the practice on the grounds that the movie companies were compounding a monopoly by using the popularity of the winning movies to compel exhibitors to purchase the losers.
Stigler disagreed and presented a simple alternative argument. If Gone with the Wind is worth $10,000 to the exhibitor and Getting Gertie's Garter is worth nothing, wrote Stigler, the distributor could get the whole $10,000 by selling Gone with the Wind. Throwing in a worthless movie would not cause the exhibitor to pay any more than $10,000. Therefore, reasoned Stigler, the Supreme Court's explanation seemed wrong.
But why did block booking exist? Stigler's explanation was that if exhibitors valued films differently from one another, the distributor could collect more by "bundling" the movies. Stigler gave an example in which exhibitor A is willing to pay $8,000 for movie X and $2,500 for Y, and B is willing to pay $7,000 for X and $3,000 for Y. If the distributor charges a single price for each movie, his profit-maximizing price is $7,000 for X and $2,500 for Y. The distributor will then collect $9,500 each from A and B, for a total of $19,000. But with block booking the seller can charge $10,000 (A and B each value the two movies combined at $10,000 or more) for the bundle and make $20,000. Stigler then went on to suggest some empirical tests of his argument and actually did one, showing that customers' relative tastes for movies, as measured by box office receipts, did differ from city to city.
Stigler's thinking on government regulation was even more influential than his work on industrial organization. Because of Stigler's research, economists view regulation much more skeptically than their counterparts of forty years ago. His first article on the topic, coauthored with long-time research assistant Claire Friedland and published in 1962, was titled "What Can Regulators Regulate? The Case of Electricity." They found that regulation of electricity prices had only a tiny effect on those prices. But more important than this finding was their showing that one could examine the actual effects of regulation, and not just theorize about them.
Stigler devoted his entire 1964 presidential address to the American Economic Association to making this point. He argued that economists should study the effects of regulation and not just assume them. In his speech he twitted the great economists of the past who had given lengthy cases for and critiques of government regulation without ever trying to study its effects. In Stigler's view things were not much better in the twentieth century. "The economic role of the state," he said, "has managed to hold the attention of scholars for over two centuries without arousing their curiosity." Stigler added, "Economists have refused either to leave the problem alone or to work on it."
Many economists got the point. Since the midsixties, economists have used their sometimes awesome empirical tools to study the effects of regulation. Whole journals have been devoted to the topic. One is the Journal of Law and Economics, started at the University of Chicago in 1958. Another, the Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, started in 1970. As a general rule economists have found that government regulation of industries harms consumers and often gives monopoly power to producers. Some of these findings were behind the widespread support of economists for the deregulation of transportation, natural gas, and banking, which gained momentum in the Carter administration and continued until halfway through the Reagan administration. Stigler was the single most important academic contributor to this movement.
Stigler was not content to examine the effects of regulation. He wanted to understand its causes. Did governments regulate industries, as many had believed, to reduce the harmful effects of monopoly? Stigler did not think so. In a seminal article, "The Theory of Economic Regulation," published in 1971, he presented and gave evidence for his "capture theory." Stigler argued that governments do not end up creating monopoly in industries by accident. Rather, he wrote, they regulate at the behest of producers who "capture" the regulatory agency and use regulation to prevent competition. Probably more important than the evidence itself was the fact that Stigler made this viewpoint respectable in the economics profession. It has now become the mainstream view.
For his earlier work on industrial organization and his work on the effects and causes of regulation, Stigler won the 1982 Nobel Prize for economics.
Stigler was an uncommonly clear and humorous writer. Economics from him never seemed like "the dismal science." Stigler, with his sometimes biting wit, could put a profound insight into one sentence. In discussing the benefits of capitalism, for example, Stigler wrote: "Professors are much more beholden to Henry Ford than to the foundation that bears his name and spreads his assets." (See box for more Stiglerisms.)
Not to be missed in a listing of Stigler's contributions is his research on information. His 1962 article "Information in the Labor Market" was a watershed for further studies on unemployment. According to Stigler, job seekers needed short periods of unemployment in order to search for a higher wage. Even in industries with a "going wage," variances in wage rates still exist. Therefore, the unemployed are as much information seekers as job seekers. His theory is now called the theory of search unemployment.
Information is also a problem for firms when they collude, implicitly or explicitly, to set prices. They do not know whether their competitors are secretly undercutting them. This uncertainty can be reduced, wrote Stigler, by spending resources to gather information. Stigler applied this insight to show that collusion is less likely to succeed if there are more firms in a market.
Also highly regarded as an economic historian, Stigler wrote numerous articles on the history of ideas in the early years of his career. His Ph.D. dissertation on the history of neoclassical production and distribution theories was highly acclaimed as a critical link in the chain of economic thought. Some of his articles in the area are collected in Five Lectures on Economic Problems (1950) and Essays in the History of Economics (1965).
The entry on monopoly in this encyclopedia is one of Stigler's last published works.
Selected Works
Five Lectures on Economic Problems. 1950.
Essays in the History of Economics. 1965.
The Theory of Price, 3d ed. 1966.
The Organization of Industry. 1969.
The Citizen and the State: Essays on Regulation. 1975.
The Essence of Stigler, edited by Kurt R. Leube and Thomas Gale Moore, eds. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. 1986.
Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist. 1988.
（来源：http://www.econlib.org/library/enc/bios/Stigler.html）
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