30 Facts About Gary Becker

Gary Stanley Becker was an American economist who received the 1992 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Gary Becker was a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago, and was a leader of the third generation of the Chicago school of economics.

Gary Becker was one of the first economists to analyze topics that had been researched in sociology, including racial discrimination, crime, family organization, and rational addiction.

Gary Becker argued that many different types of human behavior can be seen as rational and utility-maximizing, including those that are often regarded as self-destructive or irrational.

Gary Becker's approach extended to altruistic aspects of human behavior, which he showed to sometimes have self-serving ends.

Gary Becker was among the foremost exponents of the study of human capital.

Gary Becker was born to a Jewish family in Pottsville, Pennsylvania.

Gary Becker then earned a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago in 1955 with a thesis entitled The Economics of Discrimination.

At Chicago, Gary Becker was influenced by Milton Friedman, whom Gary Becker called "by far the greatest living teacher I have ever had".

In 1970 Gary Becker returned to the University of Chicago, and in 1983 was offered a joint appointment by the Sociology Department of Chicago.

Gary Becker was a founding partner of TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company.

Gary Becker was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972, a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1975, and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1986.

Gary Becker was a member, and later the president of, the Mont Pelerin Society.

Gary Becker received the Nobel Prize in 1992 "for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including nonmarket behavior".

In 1996 Gary Becker was a senior adviser to Republican Presidential Candidate Robert Dole.

In December 2004, Gary Becker started a joint weblog with Judge Richard Posner entitled The Gary Becker-Posner Blog.

About ten years later, in 1980 Gary Becker married Guity Nashat, a historian of the Middle East whose research interests overlapped his own.

Gary Becker's work has been influential not only in economics but other disciplines including sociology and demography.

Gary Becker recognized that people sometimes do not want to work with minorities because they have bias against the disadvantaged groups.

Gary Becker went on to say that discrimination increases a firm's cost because in discriminating against certain workers, the employer would have to pay more to other workers so that work can proceed without the biased ones.

Gary Becker's insight was to recognize that deadweight losses put a brake on predation.

Gary Becker took the well-known insight that deadweight losses are proportional to the square of the tax, and used it to argue that a linear increase in takings by a predatory interest group will provoke a non-linear increase in the deadweight losses its victim suffers.

Gary Becker considered labor economics to be part of capital theory.

Gary Becker mused that "economists and plan-makers have fully agreed with the concept of investing on human beings".

In 1981 Gary Becker published Treatise on the Family, where he stressed the importance of division of labor and gains from specification.

Gary Becker had previously done work on birth rates and family size, and he used this time to expand his understanding of how economics works within a family.

Gary Becker's research applies basic economic assumptions such as maximizing behavior, preferences, and equilibrium to the family.

Gary Becker analyzed determinants for marriage and divorce, family size, parents' allocation of time to their children, and changes in wealth over several generations.

Gary Becker applied the economics of an altruist to a family, wherein a person takes actions that improve the well-being of another person, despite more self-interested action being feasible.

Gary Becker pointed out that a parent foregoes higher income, by focusing on family work commitments in order to maximize a well-meaning objective.