Gary Becker

His father left Montreal for the United States at 16, having quit school after the eighth grade. His mother came from Eastern Europe at six months old and also left school after the eighth grade, because girls were not expected to go further. There were a few books in the Brooklyn house, and the financial pages. When his father lost most of his sight, reading him the stock quotations fell to Gary, who found it dull. At 16 he had to choose between the handball team and the math team, which met at the same hour. He took math, though he was better at handball. He wandered into an economics course his freshman year at Princeton, finished the degree in three, then nearly left for sociology and found sociology harder.

Milton Friedman's microeconomics course at Chicago in 1951 settled it. His dissertation, published in 1957 as The Economics of Discrimination, treated prejudice as a cost the bigot pays, and by his own account it changed nothing for years: economists said discrimination was not economics and sociologists said it was not sociology. He kept going. Human Capital in 1964 made schooling an investment. A Theory of the Allocation of Time in 1965 made an hour a scarce good with a price. Crime and Punishment in 1968 made the offender a person weighing an expected penalty, and concluded that fines should be steep and surveillance thin, since raising a fine costs almost nothing. A Treatise on the Family followed in 1981, rational addiction with Kevin Murphy in 1988, and a 2007 paper putting a kidney at roughly 15,000 dollars.

The family work is where the objection lives. Becker modeled the household as one unit maximizing a single utility, with the husband in the labor market and the wife at home because comparative advantage put them there, and he presented the arrangement as an efficient answer to incentives rather than a product of law, custom or power. Feminist and cultural economists have spent decades arguing that the model quietly imports the norms it claims to explain, and the bargaining models of intrahousehold power were built to answer him. The organ paper drew the objection that a legal market would harvest the poor of poorer countries. He was a conservative who advised Bob Dole in 1996, presided over the Mont Pelerin Society, and wrote 800 words a month in Business Week for 19 years.

His first wife, Doria Slote, died in 1970 and left him two daughters. He married the historian Guity Nashat 10 years later. He died in Chicago on May 3, 2014, at 83, of complications from surgery, and the university gave him a three-day conference the same year. Friedman called him the greatest social scientist who had worked in the second half of the century. The clearest measure of the win is that the argument stopped: economists now write about marriage, fertility, crime, addiction and discrimination without anyone objecting that it is not economics, and the behavioral economists who reject his premise about rationality had to take over his subject matter in order to do it.

Gary Becker's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Economics of Discrimination book
  His dissertation. It sank without trace for several years 1957
• Human Capital book
  Education and training as investment. His most cited work 1964
• Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach article
  The founding text of the economics of crime 1968
• A Treatise on the Family book
  Marriage, divorce, altruism and the rotten kid theorem. Expanded in 1991 1981
• A Theory of Rational Addiction article
  With Kevin Murphy. Addiction as forward-looking choice 1988
• The Becker-Posner Blog other
  Founded with Judge Richard Posner and run until Becker's death 2004

• 1946 aged ~16 Chooses the math team over the handball team at 16 The two met in the same period. He was better at handball.
• 1951 aged ~21 Graduates Princeton in three years and meets Friedman at Chicago He called Friedman by far the greatest living teacher he ever had.
• 1955 aged ~25 Takes his doctorate with a dissertation on the economics of discrimination
• 1957 aged ~27 Turns down more money from Chicago and goes to Columbia and the NBER He wanted to prove he could work outside the nest. He stayed 12 years.
• 1967 aged ~37 Awarded the John Bates Clark Medal
• 1970 aged ~40 Returns to Chicago. His wife Doria dies the same year The 1968 student unrest at Columbia hastened his decision to leave.
• 1983 aged ~53 Chicago's sociology department offers him a joint appointment A signal to that profession that rational choice counted as a theory.
• 1992 aged ~62 Awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
• May 3, 2014 aged 83 Dies in Chicago at 83

• Milton Friedman 1912–2006
  Nobel Prize-winning economist whose free-market ideas profoundly influenced American economic policy. teacher
• Ronald Coase 1910–2013
  Developed transaction-cost theory of the firm and the Coase theorem while at Chicago. Chicago colleague
• Thomas Sowell b. 1930
  Economist and social theorist at the Hoover Institution whose conservative writings span race, culture, and policy. wrote against his account of discrimination's costs
• Paul Samuelson 1915–2009
  First American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, whose textbook defined the field for decades. rival school
• Kenneth Arrow 1921–2017
  Economist whose impossibility theorem and work on general equilibrium, risk, and information reshaped modern economic theory. contemporary in choice theory
• Daniel Kahneman 1934–2024
  Israeli-American psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on behavioral economics and decision-making. attacked the rationality premise