Gary Becker wasn’t taken seriously when he began using economic principles to analyze subjects thought to be outside traditional economics, but he eventually changed how economists look at social problems. Whether evaluating the economics of the family structure or whether there should be an open market for human organs, Becker examined how rational decision-making drives specific types of human behavior. In nearly six years in academia, his areas of study included crime and punishment, racial discrimination, labor markets, drug legalization, and fertility.
Becker, whose books include “A Treatise on the Family” and “The Economic Approach to Human Behavior,” was “the most important social scientist in the past 50 years and possibly longer,” wrote fellow economist Justin Wolfers in assessing his influence after Becker’s death in 2014. “Before Professor Becker, these topics were considered noneconomic. Today, they’re central,” Wolfers said in his article for the New York Times. “Whether they are aware of it or not, whenever policymakers debate these issues today, they do so in the shadow of an analytic framework he developed.”
As a professor at the University of Chicago, Becker became associated with the Chicago School of Economics, an approach that favored monetarism over Keynesianism and which allied Becker with prominent Chicago colleagues Milton Friedman and George Stigler. Unlike Friedman, who took on a very public role in presenting his views, Becker was reserved and more inclined to publish than to orate.
Becker won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences “for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including nonmarket behavior.”
Early Influence
Born in Pottsville, Pa., in 1930, Gary Stanley Becker spent his formative years in Brooklyn, N.Y. His father owned a small business. Becker graduated from Princeton University in 1951 with a degree in economics. As noted in “Fifty Major Economists” by Steven Pressman, “Becker majored in economics because he liked its mathematical rigor but was unhappy with his economic education because ‘it didn’t deal with important social problems.’ “
Becker then went on to earn a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Chicago, where his thesis titled “The Economics of Racial Discrimination,” completed only a year after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, served as the basis for his 1957 book on the same topic. At Chicago, Becker studied under Friedman, with whom Becker’s conservative views consistently aligned.
“Gary told me that Friedman challenged him as a graduate student,” said Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, who knew Becker for more than 40 years as a colleague on the University of Chicago faculty. “Gary had been such a star at Princeton that he was very self-confident. Gary said: ‘Friedman offered very tough, pointed critiques of my ideas. I would raise my hand in class and thought I had a great point, and Friedman would dash me.’ Becker told me that was the best education he ever received.”
Becker taught at Columbia University from 1957 through 1968 before returning to Chicago for the remainder of his career. He held joint appointments there in economics and sociology, allowing him to explore how the two subjects intersected.
Becker’s desire to understand the motivations of human behavior even extended into his social engagements:
“At Chicago, Gary hosted evening seminars where he would invite sociologists, historians, anthropologists and scholars from other fields together,” said Posner. “It was a real assortment. Many of the people he invited were not economists, and Gary would restate whatever they were discussing, but in economic terms. He was always connecting other fields back to economics in very persuasive ways.”
New Perspectives
His approach concerning the family structure is illustrative:
“Becker’s analysis of fertility is a natural extension of both his theory of allocation of time and his theory of human capital,” wrote Ramon Febrero and Pedro S. Schwartz in “The Essence of Becker.” “Thus, children are seen as consumer durables, similar to cars or washing machines, who provide parents with a flow of valuable services (psychic and monetary in nature) over time. Of course, children also imply a flow of costs over time. … All this makes having children (procreating or adopting them) an economic decision (or to be more accurate, an investment decision).”
From 2004 until his death, Becker debated contemporary social issues with Posner on the Becker-Posner Blog. Much of their prolific output has been published in book form, titled “Uncommon Sense: Economic Insights, from Marriage to Terrorism.” In one post, Becker concludes that “markets in organs are the best available way to enable persons with defective organs to get transplants much more quickly than under the present system.”
According to Posner:
“Gary was committed to the purchase of organs. A lot of people were very offended by that. Some considered it religiously offensive. But Gary, as usual, took a completely nonideological, nonemotional, absolutely practical approach: This is a potential market. Kidneys are in demand, like any other product, and their allocation should be determined by market forces. I find that convincing. That was typical. Nothing stuck Gary as out of bounds, no matter how weird it was.”
Becker was sometimes pilloried for his dispassionate, objective approach.
“Becker’s critics thought that marriage, for example, was about romance, not about maximizing your utility,” said Posner. “Gary would write about division of responsibilities, where the husband is bringing in the money and the money is being used to finance the wife’s work, to take care of the kids and so forth. That way of looking at things really offended people. It seemed so mercenary!”
The resistance that Becker encountered did not dissuade him. “Uncommon Sense” contains Becker’s economic evaluations of same-sex marriage, a tax on high-fat foods, plagiarism, ethnic profiling and natural disasters, among others.
“He believed you could model people as making calculated, rational decisions in almost every sphere of life,” said Chris Miller, associate director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University and an editor of “Inequality and Economic Policy: Essays in Memory of Gary Becker.” “Becker thought that if you broke how people make decisions into pieces, you could develop a model that would, in aggregate, explain how people made decisions, even the most central decisions of their lives, such as how many children to have or whom to marry.”
Despite early derision, Becker’s approaches eventually influenced the profession, said Posner:
“Gary told me that, around 1970, when he spoke to a group of economists about choices made in marriage, they laughed at him. They thought that this was not what economists should be talking about. But he persevered. The fact that people actually made fun of him for some of the exotic subjects he studied, which were then not part of conventional economics, really annoyed him, but it did not deter him. He just persisted. And eventually, his opponents, his scoffers, they gave up.”
Influence On Economics
Becker died in Chicago on May 3, 2014, at age 83 from complications following surgery. He was survived by his wife, Guity Nashat, a historian with whom he also collaborated. He had two daughters with his first wife, Doria Slote, who died, and two stepsons from his second marriage.
Becker’s final blog post, “The Embargo of Cuba — Time To Go,” was published exactly two months before his death. Many of Becker’s posts had focused on the implications of the financial crisis.
“He was writing papers until the last year of his life that are still cited today and were still on the cutting edge of research at the time, especially on the human capital issue,” said Miller. “He was certainly a prolific scholar.”
Becker’s belief that government should not have a prominent role meant that “liberals had reservations about Gary,” said Posner.
At the same time, Miller believes that the intersectional approach to economics that Becker introduced allows for his contributions to transcend party divisions:
“Regardless of their political tilt, economists on both sides of the political spectrum recognize Becker as being enormously influential. When you look at the footnotes of scholars today, they regularly cite Becker’s work, whether they are writing from the liberal or conservative side of the spectrum. It is hard to think of anyone who has done more to apply economics to such a wide range of different spheres.”
Becker received many awards, including the National Medal of Science in 2000 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007. In 2008, a panel of Princeton University alumni ranked Becker as the 11th most influential graduate in the school’s history.
Becker is remembered for his broad influence:
“There is an entire field of political economy — about how you can use economic methods to understand politics — which Becker could be seen as the most important figure in opening up,” said Miller. “The work of almost every economist today has been shaped by Becker’s innovations.”
Becker’s Keys
Prolific author recognized for broadening the field of economics to include examination of human behaviors.
Overcame: Criticism that his new approaches were not viable.
Lesson: Persistence in the face of doubts about his approaches resulted in a career spanning nearly six decades and earned Becker the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.
“Along with others, I have tried to pry economists away from narrow assumptions about self-interest. Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences.”
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