Marginal Revolution: Tim Harford interviews Gary Becker

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Tim Harford interviews Gary Becker

Here is the link, Becker joked only once, and Tim reports:

Becker wants a clear head for tennis that afternoon. He is 75 and looks it, with fine white hair and translucent, heavily lined skin, but he moves like a younger man. When I arrived at his home to take him up on his offer of a lift to the restaurant, I could see his silhouette coming down the stairs at a fair clip. He drives confidently. In the summer, he moves his work to Cape Cod and often swims in the ocean. Becker has always loved sport, but that, and his family, seem to be his only distraction from work. "I don't like small talk too much, so I don't try to get involved in that." It is clear from even a few minutes conversation that what really motivates Becker is the world of ideas.

Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 17, 2006 at 06:14 PM in Economics | Permalink

Comments

Sigh. Gary Becker. My adoration for him borders on idolatry. I asked my wife if we could name our next kid Becker, but she said it would almost certainly condemn him to grade school hell since Becker rhymes with Pecker. (I also tried to get my kid named Ebert, but she didn't go for that one either).

Posted by: Jason Voorhees at Jun 17, 2006 8:32:35 PM

"most people have not realised that economics is not the study of money"

But economics is the study of money, wealth, investment, and consumption.

When you study trends in human behaviors such as the motivations of criminals, or the causes of happiness, that type of work is categorized as sociology or psychology rather than economics.

Many people who wear economist hats do that type of work, but that doesn't change the formal definitions of the fields.

Posted by: giovanni at Jun 18, 2006 12:08:29 AM

IOW, a great economist must also be a massive bore.

- Josh

Posted by: Wild Pegasus at Jun 18, 2006 2:55:46 AM

Giovanni - you're not technically correct. Economics is not the study of money, wealth, investment and consumption. It is the study of the use of scarce resources that have alternative uses. And it's that that leads to a focus on rationality and efficiency. Becker's work on crime (to take one example) was an attempt to build a model of optimal policy as it relates to criminality, under which he posited that crime demand was downward sloping. Becker's approach was distinctively and thoroughly microeconomics. That he was applying economic reasoning to areas outside the traditional realm does not make it any less economic, since the methodology used was utility maximization, market equilibrium and stable preference ordering.

Posted by: Jason Voorhees at Jun 18, 2006 9:06:29 AM

Giovanni
Economics would better have stuck with it's original name political economy or adopted something like incentology (see why they went with economics :) ).

Economics is the study of incentives and human behavior under differing incentive sets. That the most frequently described incentive is money leads to a considerable amount of confusion, but that doesn't negate the usefulness of any other incentives (after all most of us do not pursue money for money's sake rather because it's easy to convert it into the things we really want. Oftentimes what people say they want and what they actually want are different, which is why economists look at money (and to some extent actions) to better asses the actual internal decision.

Finance is the study of money, wealth, and investments. They are sometimes related but not always. I liken the relationship between Econ and Finance to that of Math and Physics (or Electrical Engineering). In both cases the former is much broader than the latter, and in both cases full comprehension of the specialized field requires more than a cursory understanding of the parent field. However, they remain exceedingly distinct entities with highly successful practitioners in each regularly falling on their face in the other.

Posted by: bluto at Jun 18, 2006 12:29:40 PM

The study of prudence, but as a theoretical discipline, not as a practical one. That's why Adam Smith called his minor classic "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" and his main book "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of" etc. Money is of course a homogenous good but prudence deals with heterogenous ends.

Posted by: bj89k at Jun 18, 2006 1:29:52 PM

An interview with Becker is fine, but what I am really looking forward to
is the biograph about Milton Friedman that I heard about that is
being written.

Posted by: jim at Jun 20, 2006 9:00:33 PM

Guys, I hear what you're saying; analyzing human incentives and other social science hybrid studies are clearly important. But, from a formal categorization perspective, I must agree with the dictionaries:

Economics,

Merriam-Webster: "a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services"
wiktionary: "the study of resource and wealth management and of production, investment, and consumption"

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