Gary Becker quotes

Gary Becker was an American economist renowned for applying economic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and social issues. His pioneering work explored topics such as discrimination, crime, and family dynamics through the lens of economics. He significantly influenced the expansion of economic thought beyond traditional markets. Here are 20 of his quotes:

The Treatise tries to analyze not only modern Western families, but also those in other cultures and the changes in family structure during the past several centuries.

Gary Becker

Still, intuitive assumptions about behavior is only the starting point of systematic analysis, for alone they do not yield many interesting implications.

Gary Becker

Fines are preferable to imprisonment and other types of punishment because they are more efficient. With a fine, the punishment to offenders is also revenue to the State.

Gary Becker

The phrase ‘marriage market' is used metaphorically and signifies that the mating of human populations is highly systematic and structured.

Gary Becker

The bumping of lower-quality men out of their marriages through competitive reductions in the incomes of higher-quality men continues until the incomes of the lowest quality men are reduced to their single levels.

Gary Becker

I was not sympathetic to the assumption that criminals had radically different motivations from everyone else.

Gary Becker

Why in almost all societies have married women specialized in bearing and rearing children and in certain agricultural activities, whereas married men have done most of the fighting and market work?

Gary Becker

A stronger yuan could lead to greater Chinese asset accumulation in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Gary Becker

I conclude by listing several main points of this essay: 1. Human capital is of great importance in the modern economy. 2. Human capital has become of much greater significance during the past two decades. 3. Human capital is crucial to the international division of labor. 4. Much unmeasured learning goes on in companies and by adults. 5. People need to invest in themselves during their whole lives. 6. Distance learning will become of crucial importance to the teaching and learning process. 7. Human capital stimulates technological innovations and the high-tech sector.

Gary Becker

[ Milton Friedman was] the dominant member of the so-called Chicago school of economics [during his tenure at Chicago]... The economics department increasingly reflected his approach and interests. These included deep commitment to the truth, appreciation of markets and free enterprise, frank and blunt discussion, and enormous zeal to convince the heathen. But most important was the commitment to economic analysis as a powerful instrument for interpreting economic and social life.

Gary Becker

Imagine each family as a kind of little factory--a multiperson unit producing meals, health, skills, children, and self-esteem from market goods and the time, skills, and knowledge of its members. This is only one of the remarkable concepts explored by Gary Becker in his landmark work on the family. Becker applies economic theory to the most sensitive and fateful personal decisions, such as choosing a spouse or having children. He uses the basic economic assumptions of maximizing behavior, stable preferences, arid equilibria in explicit or implicit markets to analyze the allocation of time to child care as well as to careers, to marriage and divorce in polygynous as well as monogamous societies, to the increase and decrease of wealth from one generation to another.

Gary Becker

An efficient marriage market develops ‘‘shadow'' prices to guide participants to marriages that will maximize their expected well-being. These prices, central to the analysis in this chapter and the subsequent one, are responsible for the more powerful implications found in these chapters than in traditional discussions of marriage. Some other approaches are evaluated in Chapter 4.

Gary Becker

[Gale and Shapley assumed that each person has] a given ranking [among] potential mates that determines rather than is determined by the equilibrium sorting.

Gary Becker

I am saying that the economic approach provides a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behaviour.

Gary Becker

Economy is the art of making the most of life.

Gary Becker

Even a wizard would have a great deal of difficulty repealing the economic law that higher minimum wages reduce employment. Since politicians are not wizards, they should not try.

Gary Becker

Along with others, I have tried to pry economists away from narrow assumptions about self interest. Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences.

Gary Becker

The most fundamental constraint is limited time.

Gary Becker