Gary Becker
Gary Stanley Becker ( born December 2, 1930 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania) is an American economist. He received the 1992 Prize in Economic Sciences the Bank of Sweden in memory of Alfred Nobel "for his expansion of microeconomic theory to a wide range of human behavior and cooperation."
Life
With four or five years, Becker moved from Pottsville to Brooklyn. At the age of 16, he discovered his interest in mathematics. Since he had to read the latest economic news his father always, he also gained knowledge of this area, even though he was rather bored of it.
At Princeton University, he took a course in economics by chance and was thrilled, especially from the mathematical contexts. Soon, however, he felt that the mathematical equations do not really represent the problems of society or were even able to solve.
Becker joined Princeton in 1951 with a B. A. from and then moved to the University of Chicago. There he met in 1951 in a microeconomics course for the first time, Milton Friedman. This aroused his interest in the economics again, and according to his own testimony, Friedman coined his future career. In 1955 he earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago. From 1957 to 1968 he taught at Columbia University, then returned to the University of Chicago, where he taught price theory.
Becker has two sisters, Wendy and Naralie, and a brother, Marvin. 1964 Becker married his first wife, but died in 1970. The couple had two daughters ( Judy and Catherine). In 1980 he married his second wife, Guity Nashat.
Teaching
Becker was one of the first economists who extended the economics to areas that were traditionally more likely to sociology, such as Racial discrimination, crime, family organization and drug addiction. He is known for his argument that many forms of human behavior can be understood as rational and results of utility maximization. At the same time underlines Becker in his research, the importance of interpersonal altruistic connections. In the sixties and seventies he has re-established along with authors such as Theodore William Schultz and Jacob Mincer, the concept of human capital in science.
In his book, The Economics of Discrimination Becker presented a model that explained how an existing individually with employers, colleagues or customers discrimination slope ( from him taste for discrimination called ) dare to unequal treatment in the labor market and to the creation or maintenance of a gender gap can result.
Becker pointed out in his work on the economic value of children for their parents. From Becker also comes the Rotten -Kid theorem. His theories also play a role in explaining fertility rates in demography.
According to Nobel Prize Committee may Becker's work are classified into four areas:
- Human capital investment
- Behavior of the family ( household ), in particular division of labor and time allocation within the family
- Crime and Punishment
- Discrimination in labor and product markets.
Others
Becker was in 1967 awarded the John Bates Clark Medal and is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society. Wrote from 1985 to 2004 is. Liberal characteristic Becker, alternating with the more left- liberal economists Alan Blinder of Princeton University, a monthly column in Business Week In December 2004, he started a joint weblog with Judge Richard Posner.
2007 George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, next to the Golden Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest civilian award of the United States.
Works
- Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (1964 )
- Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach ( 1968), Journal of Political Economy, 76 (2 ), pp. 169-217.
- The Economics of Discrimination (1957, 2nd edition 1971 )
- The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (1976 )
- A Treatise on the Family (1981 )
- Economic explanations of human behavior ( 1993) ISBN 3161460464
- The Economics of Life ( German The economics of everyday life ) ( 1996)
- Family, society and politics - the economic perspective (1996 ) ISBN 3-16-146361-7
- Social Economics: Market Behavior in a Social Environment ( 2001)