Abstract
George Stigler combined technical competence, erudition, and wit. Stigler asked Frank Knight’s question of how we know the goals of those we study. Early on, he offered a Knightian challenge to welfare economics, defending classical economic policy against the new orthodoxy. Later, he became an exponent of the orthodoxy. If goals are fixed, information is useful as a means to achieving them. Characterizing information as a commodity, Stigler described competitive equilibrium as a distribution of prices in a market. Policy advice is endogenous and we return to Adam Smith’s analysis in which the philosopher is no better than those he studies.
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Levy, D.M., Peart, S.J. (2018). Stigler, George Joseph (1911–1991). In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_1717
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_1717
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