منبع: marketwatch.com
Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize–winning University of Chicago economist who expanded the field well beyond its traditional scope by establishing groundbreaking connections with sociology, criminology and demographics, has died at 83.
Becker, who died Saturday, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1992 for his work on the economics of human behavior, studying why and how individuals make choices in social settings, outside the business realm.
He was one of the first in his field to focus on issues such as discrimination, the family, crime and personal choices. He also was a pioneer in the concept of “human capital,” looking at the costs and benefits of investments to improve lives.
Becker’s sometimes polarizing work hinged on the notion that humans could have a say about important decisions in their lives. He was a critic of the field known as behavioral economics, which found human behavior irrational. He studied costs and benefits to those leading a life of crime; another focus was whether someone could improve his or her fate by investing in education.
In his Nobel address, Becker described the complexity of how humans make decisions: “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.”