Gary Becker

Gary S. Becker is a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1992 for "having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including nonmarket behavior." Becker received his undergraduate degree in 1951 from Princeton University and his PhD in 1955 from the University of Chicago. He was an assistant professor at Chicago from 1954 to 1957, before moving to Columbia University and the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Gary S. Becker received the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics for 'having extended the domain of economic theory to aspects of human behavior which had previously been dealt with—if at all—by other social science disciplines such as sociology, demography and criminology.' Becker’s unusually wide applications of economics started early. In 1955 he wrote his doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago on the economics of discrimination. Among other things, Becker successfully challenged the Marxist view that discrimination helps the person who discriminates.

I was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, a little coal mining town in Eastern Pennsylvania, where my father owned a small business. ... However, when I was four or five we moved to Brooklyn, New York ... I began to lose interest in economics during my senior (third) year because it did not seem to deal with important social problems. I contemplated transferring to sociology, but found that subject too difficult. Fortunately, I decided to go to the University of Chicago for graduate work in economics. My first encounter in 1951 with Milton Friedman's course on microeconomics renewed my excitement about economics.

Awards and Honors:
John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association (1967)
National Association for Business Economics Adam Smith Award (1991)
Nobel Prize (1992)
National Medal of Science (2000)
Jacob Mincer Prize (2004)
Presidential Medal of Freedom (2007)
Bradley Prize (2008) ...
Gary S. Becker passed away on May 3, 2014. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science in 1992, and was the Rose-Marie and Jack R. Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and University Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Chicago.

[A] recent speech entitled "Competition" ... was delivered to the ... Heritage Foundation by Gary S. Becker, the winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science in 1992 ... Becker began by comparing monopolies with free markets, and concluded:

I believe that this appreciation of the value and benefits of competition, and the disadvantages of monopoly, ranks among the very greatest contributions toward understanding how economies and societies can better serve the interests of the vast majority of people.

Two primary examples that Becker used in his analysis were religion and education.

One bright spot in my first year [as a graduate student at Columbia University] was Professor Gary Becker. His insistence on applying economics to all sorts of weird things it had not been applied to before (family, marriage, crime, discrimination, etc.) seemed like a breath of fresh air. However, while he had a reputation as a free enterpriser, I was disappointed at the level of his moderation. I remember once arguing with him that the minimum wage should be abolished. His view, in contrast, was that it should be frozen in place, and then inflation would dissipate the real value of it.

Gary Becker's singular contribution has been to broaden the reach of economics into spheres it previously ignored and to thereby transform both those fields and economics itself. Crime, the family, addiction, preference formation and discrimination are a few of the areas to which he has applied the analytic tools of microeconomics ...
Our interview with Gary Becker is fittingly broad, ranging from his views on moral hazard in banking, to the intriguing genesis of his work on the economics of crime, and the (mostly) rational decision-making that led to his becoming an economist.