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By Tim Harford Author alerts

Gary Becker, US economist, 1930-2014

Nobel laureate was one of world’s mos t inf luential economists , writes Tim Harford

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Gary Becker, the man who led the movement to apply

economic ideas to areas o f life such as marriage,

discrimination and crime, died on May 3 after a long illness. He

was 83.

Born in a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania, raised in Brooklyn

and with a mathematics degree summa cum laude f rom

Princeton, it was not until Becker arrived at the University o f 

Chicago that he realised “I had to begin to learn again what

economics is all about”.

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IN Obituaries

He had cons idered taking up sociology, but found it “to o dif f icult”. Yet he was to return to t he quest ions o f 

sociology again and again over the years, taking pleasure in wielding the rigorous yet reductivemathematical tools of economics. This approach was to win him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Econo mics in

1992, and make him one of the most inf luential and mos t cited economists of the 20th century.

His doctoral dissertation was on the economics of discrimination – how to measure it and what ef f ects it

might have. Becker showed that discrimination was cos tly f or the bigot as well as the victim. This seemed

st range material for an economist , and Becker att racted litt le attention f or his ideas when he published a

book on discrimination in 1957.

This didn’t seem to worry him. “My whole philoso phy has been to be conventional in things such as dress

and so on,” he to ld me in 2005. “But when it comes to ideas, I’ll be willing to st ick my neck out: I can take

criticism if I think I’m right.”

He received plenty of that criticism over the years f or daring to develop economic theories of crime and

punishment, o f the demand for children, and of rational addicts who may quit in response to a credible

threat t o raise t he price of cigarettes. His idea that individuals might think of their education as an

investment, with a rate of return, caused outrage. Yet nobody now frets about the use of the phrase

“human capital”, the title of one of Becker’s books.

That exemplif ies the way that Becker’s approach has changed the way that economists think about what

they do, of ten without explicitly recognising his inf luence. He was economically omnivorous : colleagues

such as Lars Peter Hansen, a fellow Nobel laureate, would f ind Becker quizz ing them and providing

penetrat ing comments even on research that seemed f ar removed f rom Becker’s main interests.

“He will be remembered as a person who in a very creative way broadened the scope o f economic analysis ,”

said Prof essor Hansen, “And as one of the very best economists of the 20th century.”

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