Marriage Quote by George Stigler

The chill of Stigler's prose is the point. An economist famous for treating markets as systems of incentives and constraints turns his own marriage into a three-line dataset: initial conditions (University of Chicago), transaction date (1936), termination date (1970). No adjectives, no narrative, no grief on the surface. Just variables pinned to a timeline.

That austerity reads less like emotional poverty than like a chosen register: the academic voice as self-protection. In the Chicago milieu Stigler helped define, style often doubled as ideology. Precision signaled seriousness; sentiment risked looking like noise. The subtext is that even the most consequential human relationship can be recorded with the same spare confidence as a career milestone. It’s a statement about the kind of life economists sometimes perform: control the story by controlling the units.

The context matters. In a midcentury professional world that rewarded stoicism in men, especially in elite universities, intimacy often got relegated to the private sphere. Stigler’s line quietly obeys that rule while also revealing its cost. The mention of her full name, including the middle initial, is the lone gesture toward specificity, as if formal designation can stand in for feeling. The effect is unsettling and oddly moving: a portrait of devotion rendered as a ledger entry, suggesting that grief, too, can be disciplined into a fact.