Gary Stanley Becker

Gary Stanley Becker was an American economist born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania in 1930. Becker is described by the New York Times as “the most important social scientist in the past 50 years and possibly longer” (Wolfers 2014). Over his career, he made astonishing accomplishments that no other economics have made. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science in 1992, was the Rose-Marie and Jack R. Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the University Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Chicago and Columbia University. Moreover, He served as an economic policy adviser for the Dole presidential campaign in 1996 and received the National Medal of Science in 2000 and the Jacob Mincer Prize in 2004. Becker was also the recipient of the 2007 Presidential Medal of Freedom.
He’s especially known and celebrated for his knowledge of economics of crime, population, human capital and discrimination; “he was motivated by the belief that economics, taken seriously, could improve the human condition” (Wolfers 2014). It’s important to note that very few economists have thought about such notion and even applied economic analysis on social issues such as racial discrimination. In his book, The Economics of Discrimination (1971), he talked about
discriminations that exist in multiple facades, from employer, employee, consumer, government, racial and market discrimination. He also discussed how all these types of discrimination changes over time. “Becker showed that discrimination will be less pervasive in more competitive industries because companies that discriminate will lose market share to companies that do not. He also presented evidence that discrimination is more pervasive in more-regulated, and therefore less-competitive, industries.” (Econlib). With this, he staged the idea that discrimination comes at a cost.

When it comes to economic of crime, Becker laid the framework and made vast Contribution to the economic analysis of crime and law.
In his work titled Essays in the Economics of Crime and Punishment (1974), he asked the question: " ... how many resources and how much punishment should be used to enforce different kinds of legislation? Put equivalently, although more strangely, how many offenses should be permitted and how many offenders should go unpunished” (Becker 1974). He would go on and assessed the notion of “rational crime”. That is, just like any other economic agent, a criminal seeks to maximize their utilities; the only difference is they choose to do so through means deem
illegal.

He also made other remarkable contributions to economics and sociology and would take too many pages than allowed to talk about.

Moreover, in an unfortunate event, Becker passed away just two years ago. Despite this, he was and still considered to be one of the most influential economists of the last century, an almost understatement.