Gary Becker passed away on Saturday. My obituary for the Financial Times is below.
Gary Becker, the man who led the movement to apply economic ideas to areas of 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 from Princeton, it was not until Becker arrived at the University of Chicago that he realised “I had to begin to learn again what economics is all about”.
He had considered taking up sociology, but found it “too difficult”. Yet he was to return to the questions of sociology again and again over the years, taking pleasure in wielding the rigorous yet reductive mathematical tools of economics. This approach was to win him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1992, and make him one of the most influential and most cited economists of the 20th century.
His doctoral dissertation was on the economics of discrimination – how to measure it and what effects it might have. Becker showed that discrimination was costly for the bigot as well as the victim. This seemed strange material for an economist, and Becker attracted little attention for his ideas when he published a book on discrimination in 1957.
This didn’t seem to worry him. “My whole philosophy has been to be conventional in things such as dress and so on,” he told me in 2005. “But when it comes to ideas, I’ll be willing to stick my neck out: I can take criticism if I think I’m right.”
He received plenty of that criticism over the years for daring to develop economic theories of crime and punishment, of the demand for children, and of rational addicts who may quit in response to a credible threat to raise the 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 exemplifies the way that Becker’s approach has changed the way that economists think about what they do, often without explicitly recognising his influence. He was economically omnivorous: colleagues such as Lars Peter Hansen, a fellow Nobel laureate, would find Becker quizzing them and providing penetrating comments even on research that seemed far removed from Becker’s main interests.
“He will be remembered as a person who in a very creative way broadened the scope of economic analysis,” said Professor Hansen, “And as one of the very best economists of the 20th century.”
Becker’s life-long affection was for the subject he transformed. On weekend afternoons, he would often be found in his office, writing or answering questions from young academics six decades his junior. He continued to write a blog with the legal scholar Richard Posner until a few weeks before his death.
“He loved economics,” said Kevin Murphy, who taught a course alongside Becker for many years, “and he inspired so many economists.” Perhaps the most likely result of a class with Becker was not mastering a particular formal technique, but acquiring that distinctive economist’s outlook on the world.
That worldview was on display when on the way to his Lunch with the FT, Gary Becker parked illegally. On cross-examination, he cheerfully told me that after weighing the risks and benefits, this was a rational crime.
“That sounds like Gary to me,” said Prof Murphy. “He decided to give you a practical lesson in economics.”
Becker was widowed in 1970, and remarried in 1980 to a Chicago history professor, Guity Nashat. She survives him, as does a daughter, Catherine Becker; a sister, Natalie Becker; a stepson and two grandsons.
You can read my lunch with Gary Becker, or read more about his ideas in The Logic of Life. It was clear, speaking to his colleagues, that he will be greatly missed.