Daily Inspiration Quote by George Stigler

A throwaway line that quietly does two things at once: it timestamps a career and stakes a claim to a lineage. Stigler isn’t bragging in the usual way; he’s issuing a credential. “Price theory” isn’t just a topic here, it’s a flag planted in a particular Chicago-style territory where economics is supposed to be clear, disciplined, and suspicious of grand social theorizing. By dating his “working and publishing” to 1938, he’s anchoring himself before the postwar boom of formalism and macro fetishism, before Keynesian policy economics became the cultural common sense of the profession. The subtext is: I was there early, before it was fashionable, and I helped define the craft.

The phrasing is tellingly bureaucratic: “working and publishing” sounds like a CV line, a professional self carved down to output and chronology. That restraint is the point. Stigler’s public persona traded in a kind of hardheaded modesty that doubles as dominance: no sweeping claims, just an insinuation that the serious people know what “price theory” means and who belongs to its inner history.

Context matters. 1938 sits at the tail end of the Depression, with policy experimentation in the air and economics fighting over its identity. To say you were publishing price theory then is to position yourself against the era’s most urgent temptations - planning, intervention, the romance of the state - and to suggest that the micro foundations were always the real engine. It’s an origin story packaged as a date stamp: authority by seniority, ideology by understatement.