"A modern economic system is of extraordinary complexity. Imagine a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, consisting of roughly 100 million parts. Some parts touch against, let us say, 1,000 other parts. (That is, each family deals at one time or another with that many employers, banks, retail stores, domestic servants, and so on.) Other parts touch—let us be conservative—50,000 other parts (firms that sell to retailers and buy from other firms and hire laborers and so on). It would be enough of a task to fit these 100 million pieces together, but the real difficulties have yet to be mentioned. The pieces change shape quite often—a family has twins; a firm does the next best thing and invents a new product. The economist has the interesting task of predicting (in the aggregate) each of these movements. Meanwhile a busy set of people—congressmen, members of regulatory bodies, central bankers, and the like—are changing the rules on who or what the jigsaw pieces will be and how they are shaped. And of course there are other jigsaw puzzles (foreign economies) of comparable complexity, and these other puzzles are connected at literally a million points with our puzzle."
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People from SeattleNobel laureates from the United StatesEconomists from the United StatesColumbia University facultyNobel laureates in Economics
Original Language: English
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4th ed. (1987), Chap. 1 : Introduction to Economic Analysis
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Stigler
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George Stigler
George Joseph Stigler (January 17, 1911 – December 1, 1991) was a U.S. economist. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1982, and was a key leader of the Chicago School of Economics, along with his close friend Milton Friedman.
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