Science & Tech Quote by George Stigler

Stigler is admitting, with a characteristically dry straight face, that economists have a talent for outgrowing the world that made them relevant. The “one time appeal” he mentions is a quiet eulogy for an older style of political economy: messy, institutional, curious about how ideas actually get made and circulate. As “our science has become more abstract,” the profession’s prestige rises even as its field of vision narrows. That’s the pointed subtext: abstraction isn’t just a method, it’s a social choice that rewards certain questions and makes others look unserious.

His pivot is the real tell. Instead of mourning the loss, Stigler leans into it: his interest grows “more intense” precisely because the sociology of science is becoming harder to ignore. That phrase signals a 20th-century turn in how intellectuals talk about knowledge: not as a pure pipeline from facts to truth, but as an ecosystem shaped by incentives, status, journals, grants, and professional gatekeeping. Coming from Stigler, a Chicago-school economist attuned to how markets and institutions discipline behavior, it reads less like a confession than an extension of his toolkit. If economists respond to incentives, why wouldn’t economists, as a tribe, also be governed by them?

The line works because it carries two registers at once: nostalgia for a less sterilized economics, and a slyly optimistic wager that the profession’s own abstraction will force it to confront the social machinery behind “science” itself.