Word: stigler
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Invitations to the White House are de rigueurfor Nobel prizewinners, but candor in the White House press room is not. Thus there were more than a few red faces at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue last week when conservative University of Chicago Economist George Stigler, 71, after a little chat with President Reagan in the Oval Office, was led into the briefing room for a few minutes with reporters. Someone half-heartedly asked the new Nobel laureate what he thought of Reaganomics. The professor, who is said to be a tough grader back home, lived up to his reputation, saying that...
Born in Renton, Wash., in 1911, the son of a Bavarian immigrant whose various jobs included managing apartment buildings, Stigler graduated from the University of Washington in 1931. Seeing little if any chance to land a paying job in the depths of the Great Depression, he decided to try his hand at graduate school. The fateful decision took Stigler first to Northwestern University in Chicago for a master's degree, and thereafter to the University of Chicago for a Ph.D. His first teaching post was an assistant professorship at Iowa State University. In 1941 Stigler published his first work...
...Stigler's more widely read and certainly most controversial works, Roofs or Ceilings, enraged liberals when it was first published in 1964. Since then, however, the book has become must reading for economists of all political perspectives and has gained additional popularity as government deregulation of business has grown to be an increasingly important political issue...
Written in collaboration with Friedman, Roofs or Ceilings argued, among other things, that rent controls on housing had the inevitable effect of distorting rental markets, thereby eventually leading to severe apartment shortages. Said Stigler of his findings: "When rent control is enacted, the original tenants benefit in the short run, but in the long run, property values decline, the tax base is eroded, and the losers wind up losing more than the winners gain. In the end, national income itself is reduced...
Among the many people who telephoned Stigler to offer congratulations was another enthusiastic critic of over-regulation by government. Said a grinning Stigler of his early-morning telephone chat with Ronald Reagan: "I told him he was a good President, and not to quit...