Becker, Gary S. (1930–)

Reyk Albrecht

Gary S. Becker received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in the year 1992: “For having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including nonmarket behavior.” With his new perspective, he widened the scope of economic sciences and at the same time added numerous insights to the human behavior research and the field of anthropology. Becker considers economics not as a science that deals with a specific subject matter. For him, economics is a specific method that can be applied to all areas of human life. The basic assumptions of his approach are based on the rational choice model: maximizing behavior of human beings, stable preferences in regard to the central aspects of life, and the existence of markets where the allocation of scarce resources is coordinated and a market equilibrium is reached. At the same time, Becker acknowledges the wide range ...

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