Daily Inspiration Quote by George Stigler

Stigler’s sentence reads like a dry timestamp, but it’s really a flag planted in the middle of a political storm. “It was in the 1960s” does more than date a research project: it locates his intellectual pivot in an era when American faith in expert governance was peaking. The Great Society, expanding federal agencies, and the maturation of the postwar administrative state created a widespread assumption that regulation was a neutral tool - technocrats correcting “market failures” with calibrated rules. Stigler’s intent is to signal that he’s studying regulation not as civics, but as political economy: who benefits, who pays, and how the system actually behaves.

The key phrase is “detailed study.” It’s a quiet jab at the older, quasi-moral story about regulators serving the public interest. Stigler is implying that regulation had been discussed in lofty terms, but insufficiently inspected at the level where incentives, lobbying, and institutional self-preservation live. That choice of words telegraphs his signature move: treating government actors as human, strategic, and self-interested, not as disembodied referees.

The subtext: regulation isn’t simply imposed on business; it can be demanded by it. By placing his beginning in the 1960s, Stigler also hints at why the question became unavoidable then: industries had grown complex, agencies had become permanent players, and the contest over rules was becoming a central arena of capitalism itself. The line’s modesty is part of its force. He makes the turn sound clinical, almost accidental, while setting up a reframing that would later be labeled “regulatory capture” and become a staple of skepticism about the administrative state.