"CHOOSING EFFICIENTLY AMONG ALTERNATE WAYS TO USE RESOURCES": INSCRIBED BY ECONOMIST GEORGE J. STIGLER

STIGLER, George J. Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist. New York: Basic Books, (1988). Octavo, original blue cloth, original dust jacket. $800.

First edition of Stigler's memoirs, inscribed on the half title: "To Sara and Courtenay. George J. Stigler."

George Stigler's autobiography is "a vivid and wonderfully written account of both his personal and professional life… He was a major intellectual force behind one of the most influential schools of thought in economics, known as the Chicago school" (ANB). Stigler was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1982 "for his seminal studies of industrial structures, functioning of markets and causes and effects of public regulation." "The [Adam] Smith we know—or think we know—today didn’t arrive until the mid-20th century. In a country reshaped by Depression, war and Cold War anxieties, economists George Stigler and Milton Friedman came up with an expansive new view of Smith, recasting him as an advocate of a self-regulating market system grounded in rational self-interest" (Wall Street Journal). "In 1946, with Milton Friedman, Mr. Stigler found that rent control was removing the incentive to build houses and so was creating not a greater supply of housing but a shortage. Later, he found that public regulation of power companies and the Securities and Exchange Commission don't do (and sometimes subvert) what they were designed to do. Research and logic, he says, forced him to these conclusions" (New York Times).

A fine inscribed copy.