﻿ Gary Stanley Becker: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics | Library of Economics and Liberty

Gary Stanley Becker

(1930-2014 )



In the early 1960s Becker moved on to the fledgling area of human capital. One of the founders of the concept (the other being Theodore Schultz), Becker pointed out what again seems like common sense but was new at the time: education is an investment. Education adds to our human capital just as other investments add to physical capital. (For more on this, see Becker’s article, “Human Capital,” in this encyclopedia.)

One of Becker’s insights is that time is a major cost of investing in education. Possibly that insight led him to his next major area, the study of the allocation of time within a family. Applying the economist’s concept of opportunity cost, Becker showed that as market wages rose, the cost to married women of staying home would rise. They would want to work outside the home and economize on household tasks by buying more appliances and fast food.


In the 1970s Becker extended his insights on allocation of time within a family, using the economic approach to explain the decisions to have children and to educate them, and the decisions to marry and to divorce.

Becker was a professor at Columbia University from 1957 to 1969. Except for that period, he spent his entire career at the University of Chicago, where he held joint appointments in the departments of economics and sociology. Becker won the John Bates Clark Award of the American Economic Association in 1967 and was president of that association in 1987.

Selected Works

1971. The Economics of Discrimination. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1975. Human Capital. 2d ed. New York: Columbia University Press.
1981. Treatise on the Family. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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