Gary Becker

Lore & Background

Becker was born to a Jewish family in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. He received a BA from Princeton University in 1951 and a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1955. At Chicago, he was influenced by Milton Friedman, whom Becker called 'by far the greatest living teacher I have ever had.' Becker also credited Gregg Lewis, T. W. Schultz, Aaron Director, and L. J. Savage for influencing his future work. He worked as an assistant professor at Chicago, then moved to Columbia University in 1957 while conducting research at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He returned to the University of Chicago in 1970 and in 1983 was offered a joint appointment by the Sociology Department. He was a founding partner of TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company. A political conservative, he wrote a monthly column for Business Week from 1985 to 2004 and was a senior adviser to Republican presidential candidate Robert Dole in 1996. In December 2004, he started a joint weblog with Judge Richard Posner entitled The Becker-Posner Blog.

Reader's Guide

Becker's significance lies in his extension of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including nonmarket behavior, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1992. His work on human capital, introduced in his 1964 book, changed how economists think about education and skills, arguing that people gain economic value from investments in schooling, training, and health. This theory helped explain wage differences and influenced research on labor markets and economic growth. Becker also analyzed discrimination, crime, and family organization through a rational-choice lens. He recognized that discrimination increases a firm's cost, and that criminals rationally weigh benefits against costs of punishment. His insights into deadweight losses and predation contributed to what is known as Chicago political economy. Becker's work has over 200,000 citations on Google Scholar and has influenced not only economics but also sociology and demography. Economist Justin Wolfers called him 'the most important social scientist in the past 50 years.'

Did You Know?

• Becker received the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007.
• A 2011 survey of economics professors named Becker their favorite living economist over the age of 60.
• Becker won the John Bates Clark Medal in 1967.
• He was a member and later president of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1990.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"[A] revenue-neutral carbon tax would benefit all Americans by eliminating the need for costly energy subsidies while promoting a level playing field for energy producers." — Gary Becker "Gary S. Becker. A Treatise on the Family. Harvard university press, 1981; 1991; 1993; 2009." — Gary Becker "The phrase ‘marriage market’ is used metaphorically and signifies that the mating of human populations is highly systematic and structured." — Gary Becker "The bumping of lower-quality men out of their marriages through competitive reductions in the incomes of higher-quality men continues until the incomes of the lowest quality men are reduced to their single levels." — Gary Becker