Postscript: Gary Becker (1930-2014)

Gary Becker, who died on Saturday at the age of eighty-three, was one of the most renowned economists of the post-war era. Together with Milton Friedman, he helped make the University of Chicago the world leader in free-market economics. While Friedman was more famous to the general public, Becker
was equally influential, or perhaps even more influential, among professional economists. (Each won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics—Friedman in 1976, Becker in 1992.) In a career covering more than fifty years, Becker applied economic reasoning to a whole range of subjects, including education, family structure, race relations, and reproduction. His insistence that rational cost-benefit analysis could be applied to issues such as marriage and reproduction offended some non-economists, but was widely copied, as was his insistence that markets were the best way to allocate things like places in schools, immigration visas, and even human organs.

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