Gary Becker

Gary Stanley Becker was an American economist and a key figure in the third generation of the Chicago school of economics. He held joint professorships in economics and sociology at the University of Chicago. In 1992, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and in 2007 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. A 2011 survey of economics professors ranked Becker as their favorite living economist over 60, ahead of Kenneth Arrow and Robert Solow. Economist Justin Wolfers called him the most important social scientist of the previous 50 years.

Becker was among the first economists to study subjects usually left to sociology, such as racial discrimination, crime, family dynamics, and rational addiction. He argued that much human behavior—even actions often seen as irrational or self-destructive—could be understood as rational and utility-maximizing. He also applied this framework to altruism, showing that it could serve self-interested ends when utility is properly defined. He was a leading advocate for the study of human capital. Milton Friedman described him as the greatest social scientist of the second half of the twentieth century.

Born to a Jewish family in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, Becker earned a BA from Princeton University in 1951, writing a senior thesis on multi-country trade. He completed his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1955 with a dissertation titled *The Economics of Discrimination*. At Chicago, he was deeply influenced by Milton Friedman, whom he called his greatest teacher, as well as by Gregg Lewis, T. W. Schultz, Aaron Director, and L. J. Savage.

After a short stint as an assistant professor at Chicago, Becker moved to Columbia University in 1957, while also working at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He returned to the University of Chicago in 1970 and in 1983 received a joint appointment in the sociology department. He was elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1965. Becker was a founding partner of TGG Group, a consulting firm focused on business and philanthropy. He won the John Bates Clark Medal in 1967. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972, the National Academy of Sciences in 1975, and the American Philosophical Society in 1986. He was a member and later president of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1990. The Nobel committee awarded him the prize for extending microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior, including nonmarket activities. He received the National Medal of Science in 2000 and the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement in 2001. His work has accumulated over 200,000 citations on Google Scholar.

A political conservative, Becker wrote a monthly column for *Business Week* from 1985 to 2004, alternating with liberal economist Alan Blinder. In 1996, he served as a senior adviser to Republican presidential candidate Robert Dole. In December 2004, he co-founded *The Becker-Posner Blog* with Judge Richard Posner.

Becker’s work influenced not only economics but also sociology and demography. His most famous book is *Human Capital*, and he wrote on marriage, the family, criminal behavior, and racial discrimination. On discrimination, he noted that biased employers, customers, or employees may avoid working with minorities, raising a firm’s costs. Discriminating employers must pay more to other workers to compensate, whereas hiring minorities could allow lower wages, more employment, and higher productivity.

In politics, Becker is considered a founder of “Chicago political economy.” He argued that deadweight losses—which rise with the square of a tax—limit predatory behavior. As a predatory group increases its takings, the victim’s deadweight losses grow nonlinearly, spurring stronger resistance. This dynamic slows the predator’s advance.

On crime and punishment, jurist Richard Posner noted Becker’s enormous influence. Becker acknowledged that many people act morally, but argued that criminals rationally weigh the benefits of crime against its costs, including the likelihood of apprehension, conviction, and punishment, given their available opportunities.