GARY BECKER EXPANDING THE SCOPE OF ECONOMICS

Abstract

When I arrived at the University of Chicago in September, 1954, the new assistant professors in the department included Gary Becker, Bob Gustafson, and Roy Radner. Cowles Commission was leaving for Yale, and there was no introductory course in mathematical economics. Meyer L. Burstein asked Gary and Dick Muth if they could offer us a noncredit course. Working through R.G.D. Allen constituted my first encounter with Gary Becker, teacher and economist. My next exposure revealed his innovative streak when he spoke on the demand for children and the determinants of fertility. Over the next 40 years, I have followed Gary's research and publications beginning with racial discrimination and followed by human capital, the allocation of time, crime and punishment, altruism and the theory of social interactions, marriage and the family, economic growth, habits and addictions choices over time and endogenous time preference. His curriculum vitae is fat and shows no sign of slowing in its rate of growth. Adam Smith (1776, 234) noted that The progressive state is really the hardy and cheery state, the stationary is dull, and the declining domain of economics was initially limited to the production and exchange of material products, but it was soon extended to intangible services. Gary Becker has imaginatively applied the familiar tools of economic analysis to a far wider range of activities. Thanks to his insights, we have new ways of looking at problems that were often left to other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and the law. However, some of his topics are like the polar bear and Atlantic cod. Their importance is slowly declining. We are having fewer children, the family is a dying institution, and the Civil Rights Act is evidently reducing the injurious effects of racial discrimination. For the great mass of economists, these subjects are melancholy. But crime, addiction, and endogenous time preference are exciting topics for a progressive economist. Crime is surely an important aspect of any society. prison population has increased by three-fold since 1975. We lack satisfactory explanations for the rapid growth in crime and the reasons for what the media claim is a rising tide of violence. We equivocate over our policies with respect to punishment and rehabilitation. Indeed, Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to America in 1830 not to observe democracy but to inspect our prisons. Gary Becker was, I believe, one of the first economists to study crime. It reminded me about one of my earliest airline trips. man seated next to me was a meteorologist who learned that I was studying economics and statistics. As our DC-6 descended toward Midway airport, he asked me, Have you ever heard of Jerzy Neyman? When I indicated in the affirmative, he probed further, Is he any good? When I responded, is first-rate, the meteorologist commented on the wave lengths of the cloud cover below us and spoke in a soft voice. Did you know that Neyman has been doing research on cloud seeding? He might be a fine statistician, but all that I can say about Neyman is that he is aggressively ignorant about all of meteorology. When I related this conversation to Bill Niskanen, Bill told me that Jerzy Neyman was doing the right thing. A few years later, Bob Clower described a young economist as a scholar who was bringing a new head to Keynesian economics. But fresh new heads are heterogeneous. I don't recall if Clower's find made a contribution, nor do I know if we ever solved the problem of how to successfully seed a cloud. But Neyman probably got those guys to study statistics and to design better experiments. model developed by Becker (1968) invoked two assumptions. First, the obedience to law is not taken for granted. supply of criminal offenses is similar to the supply of other economic activities. Second, the allocation of public and private resources to the prevention of crimes and the punishment of offenders should be guided by an objective of minimizing the sum of harm, prevention, and enforcement costs. …