Gary S. Becker
University of Chicago
University Professor, Department of Economics and Sociology; Professor, University of Chicago Booth School of Business; Chair, Becker Friedman Institute
Gary S. Becker 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. He also is the Rose-Marie and Jack R. Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a Research Associate of the Economics Research Center at the National Opinion Research Center, and an associate member of the Institute of Fiscal and Monetary Policy for the Ministry of Finance in Japan. Becker has pioneered study in the fields of human capital, economics of the family, and economic analysis of crime, discrimination, addiction, and population.
He is the author of more than 12 books and more than 50 articles. Becker completed his undergraduate work summa cum laude in mathematics at Princeton University, where he accidentally took a course in economics as a freshman and was greatly attracted by the mathematical rigor of a subject that dealt with social organization.
He earned a master's degree and a PhD from the University of Chicago, where he was inspired by Milton Friedman. His doctorate was awarded in 1955. Becker also holds honorary degrees from several institutions, including Princeton University, Harvard University, Columbia University, and Hitoshibashi University in Japan. He was an assistant professor in economics at the University of Chicago from 1954 to 1957, then taught at Columbia University from 1957 to 1969, before he returned to Chicago.