Stigler on the Economics of Scholarly Advice. The comments of George
Stigler on a review article by Paul Joskow and Roger Noll: "Joskow and
Noll are good enough to devote the last third of their pages to telling
us what to work on in the future. On its face this is extraordinarily self-sacrificial
behavior: Promising ideas are all that even a rich scholar possesses, and
here they are giving away their wealth. Or can it be that these proposed
lines of research are not worth their time, but are perhaps worth ours?
Rather than pursue the economics of scholarly advice, let me simply say
that I have always thought that revealed preference is the only reliable
guide to what a scholar believes to be fruitful research problems: If he
doesn't work on them, he provides no reason for us to do so." (Studies
in Public Regulation, Gary Fromm, ed., 1981, p. 76)