Remembering Gary Becker

Rarely have I read the first few paragraphs of an article and felt that it captures the essence of the words to follow as well as I just have in Heckman, et al., Gary Becker Remembered. Perhaps this impact is because of the subject matter and my interest forged in the 1970s. Gary Becker made study of economics at The Ohio State University so exciting for me and my student colleagues such as Randy King, Tim Carr and Patricia Shields.  

It was a period where the 2nd edition of Human Capital had just come out, when we had read mimeograph copies of his Woytinsky lecture and struggled with his Theory of the Allocation of Time. Generally, his work and thought permeating all we did and studied. He made so much sense and conveyed so much wisdom.  It was a time we were working for the National Longitudinal Surveys under Herb Parnes, taking micro and labor from him, Belton Fleisher, Don Parsons and Ed Ray. All who made my interest in labor and labor econometrics all the more deep. Additionally, George Rhodes and Jerry Thursby pushed me econometrically and I had all that wonderful access to the early waves of the original NLS cohorts. It was a great time, although I did not necessarily think so at the time being a typical graduate student with little time to consider words like “great time.” It was at least exciting and rewarding, and over the next 40 years fulfilling.  

We who were running massive number of wage equations had him ever in our thoughts. We built on his foundation while stretching the model this way and that, but always on his foundation. While I have long ceased running wage regressions, my students in econometrics regularly do as they practice the techniques and at the root of their work is making sure they who are not all labor economic oriented, understand that the foundation on which they learn and build is Beckers, making them read the now basic work that was so vivid in the 70s. Whether they apply techniques from Ronald Oaxaca or Jim Heckman or others, it is Becker with whom they must first contend. He was an “intellectual giant” always the scientist, depending on the evidence from the causal link of theory to data and analysis and on to testable conclusion. Come to think of it, few others can boast of such a tight link between the economic model and the econometric model and testable results over and over that confirms his brilliance.

“Gary Becker was an intellectual giant. No one had a greater impact on broadening economics and making its impact felt throughout the social sciences than Becker. Indeed, Milton Friedman once described Gary Becker as the most important social scientist of the second half of the twentieth century.

“For those of us who knew him, he was the most creative thinker we ever encountered. It was his astounding imagination that made many of his early critics think of him as a heretic. They were correct: he was a heretic much like Luther, Copernicus, and Galileo, who transformed their worlds, just as he transformed economics. He brought a rigorous and insightful approach to issues that were viewed as inherently noneconomic. Eventually, he won over the economics profession, detractors and all, who eventually became converts.

“Becker was a scientist in the true sense of the word. He believed that economics was useful only if it explained and helped to improve the world. He practiced what he preached and carefully analyzed all of the social problems he addressed. He was innovative yet rigorous, open to new thought yet disciplined in sticking to the established rules of analysis. Most importantly, he extended the boundaries of economics to much of social science.” 

Read the rest at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/698751