Daily Inspiration Quote by Merton Miller

There’s a quiet swagger in that “however.” It’s the verbal equivalent of pushing a stack of casebooks aside to make room for something more ambitious: a field that doesn’t just arbitrate disputes, but tries to explain the machinery that produces them. Coming from Merton Miller, the line reads less like a biographical footnote than a declaration of intellectual allegiance. Law is the rulebook; economics is the game theory behind who writes the rules, who benefits, and how incentives bend behavior long before anyone ends up in court.

The subtext is also mid-century American: the era when economics was upgrading its self-image from moral philosophy and policy talk to a hard, model-driven discipline with the confidence of engineering. Miller’s career helped cement that shift. In corporate finance, he and Franco Modigliani treated firms not as melodramas of boardroom genius but as systems constrained by taxes, information, and markets. In that world, legal form matters, but it’s not the main event; it’s a wrapper around deeper forces.

The intent, then, is a kind of methodological flag-planting. “Not law” signals impatience with case-by-case reasoning and reverence for precedent. “Economics” signals a preference for first principles, abstractions, and the audacity to claim you can derive big truths from clean assumptions. It’s understated, almost polite, but it carries an economist’s signature provocation: if you want to understand power, don’t start with the courtroom. Start with incentives.