Daily Inspiration Quote by George Stigler

Stigler’s sentence reads like a bureaucratic form filled out by someone who helped redesign the form itself. No flourish, no self-mythology, just the institutional coordinates: University of Chicago, Ph.D., 1938. The intent is plainly credentialing, but the subtext is Chicago-style: authority comes from method, not personality. He’s telling you where he was stamped, and trusting that the stamp will do the talking.

That economy of language isn’t accidental. Stigler became a central figure in the Chicago School, a tradition that sold itself on clarity, skepticism about romantic policy claims, and a hard preference for incentives over moralizing. In that light, “main graduate training” is a careful phrase. It nods to the fact that intellectual formation is rarely tidy - mentors, visiting posts, and wartime dislocations mattered for his generation - while still anchoring his identity to a single place with a strong brand. The line quietly draws a boundary: whatever else I learned, my governing sensibility was made there.

The date matters, too. A 1938 Chicago Ph.D. arrives after the shock of the Depression but before the postwar Keynesian consensus fully congealed. It’s a moment when economics is remaking itself as a more technical, professionalized discipline, and when Chicago is positioning itself as both inside the academy and against its prevailing winds. Stigler’s restraint signals belonging to a guild: let the work argue; the résumé is just provenance.