Education Quote by George Stigler

A line that reads like a deadpan CV entry is doing more than bookkeeping. Stigler, a master of the cool Chicago-school posture, uses the plainest possible diction to stage a quiet drama about lineage: economics as an apprenticeship culture, where names and chairs matter as much as ideas. “My teaching began” is biographical, but it also frames teaching as an origin story, a claim to legitimacy that starts not with publication or theory but with institutional placement.

The real payload is the final clause: “where T. W. Schultz was the department chairman.” Schultz isn’t incidental scenery; he’s a credential. In a profession that runs on networks and reputational capital, invoking a future Nobel laureate functions like a subtle stamp of seriousness. Stigler isn’t bragging loudly; he’s performing the economist’s version of understatement, letting the reader connect the dots: if you started under Schultz, you were close to the early currents that would harden into midcentury American economics - empiricism, policy relevance, the emerging prestige of agricultural and labor economics, and later, human capital.

Context sharpens the subtext. 1936 is the Depression’s long shadow, when economics wasn’t an abstract parlor game but a discipline under political and public scrutiny. To begin teaching then is to enter a field being asked to justify itself in real time. Stigler’s sentence implies steadiness amid upheaval: no melodrama, no ideological throat-clearing, just a calm anchoring in department life and hierarchy.

It’s also an institutional memory move. Stigler, who would become synonymous with Chicago’s hard-edged price theory and skepticism of regulatory romance, is signaling that his story starts not in myth but in a specific place, under a specific administrator - as if to say: ideas have addresses, and careers have gatekeepers.