War & Peace Quote by George Stigler

Stigler compresses a whole era of American intellectual history into a sentence that refuses to perform. No drama, no triumphalism: just a career path interrupted by war, rendered in the dry passive voice of a man trained to distrust ornament. “From which I was on leave” is doing a lot of work. It frames the war not as a rupture but as an administrative exception, a bureaucratic parenthesis in the steady project of scholarship. That understatement is the tell.

The real flex is the Statistical Research Group at Columbia. In wartime, economists and mathematicians didn’t just comment on events; they became part of the machinery. SRG was one of the hubs where statistical theory, operations research, and military necessity fused into a new kind of expertise. Stigler’s phrasing treats it like a posting, but the subtext is prestige and proximity to power: this is where quantification became a national asset, and where social scientists learned that models could move materiel, allocate risk, and influence outcomes.

There’s also a quiet self-positioning here. Stigler later became synonymous with Chicago-style economics and a hard-nosed view of institutions and incentives. This line hints at the formative experience behind that sensibility: years spent in a setting where measurement had consequences and uncertainty had to be managed, not philosophized. The sentence’s flatness isn’t accidental; it’s a rhetorical signature that matches the worldview. History happens, you take leave, you do the work, you return.