Gary Becker
Gary S. Becker, AM '53, PhD '55, chair of this Institute, has pioneered study in the fields of human capital, economics of the family, and economic analysis of crime, addiction, discrimination, and more. He won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences “for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including non-market behavior.”
In 2011 the Institute was named to honor the contributions of Becker and his mentor, Milton Friedman, who shared a belief in the power of economics as a tool to understand the world and address serious problems.
Becker discovered economics when he “accidentally” took a course as an undergraduate at Princeton University. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Milton Friedman’s microeconomics course introduced him to economic theory as a powerful tool to analyze the real world. He has applied that tool creatively since joining the University of Chicago economics faculty in 1954. From 1957 to 1969, he taught at Columbia University and was a senior research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, returning to the University of Chicago faculty in 1970.
Becker has been a force that shifted the focus of entire disciplines. His work opened economics to inquiry into family size, marriage and divorce, crime, addiction, and other topics previously in the domain of sociology or psychology. He is widely recognized for his key role in developing the field of human capital. He injected the paradigm of rational choice to sociology, and applied economic modeling to key questions in political science. He introduced countless students to price theory, which looks at aspects of modern life through the lens of markets and incentives. The Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory was named in his honor in 2006.
Today Becker is University Professor in the Departments of Economics and Sociology and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He also is Rose-Marie and Jack R. Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a research associate of the Economics Research Center at the National Opinion Research Center.
His achievements and honors are too numerous to list, but a few stand out. He has received the John Bates Clark Medal, the Seidman Award, and the first social science Award of Merit from the National Institutes of Health. More recently, he was awarded the National Medal of Science and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.
Selected Publications
See list at lib.uchicago.edu »
