Economic analysis
Becker's develope has been influential non only in economics but also other disciplines including sociology and demography. His almost famous work is Human Capital, and he wrote on sociological topics as diverse as marriage, the family, criminal behavior, and racial discrimination.
Becker recognized that people employers, customers, and employees sometimes do non want to work with minorities because they have bias against the disadvantaged groups. He went on to say that discrimination increases a firm's make up because in discriminating againstworkers, the employer would have to pay more to other workers so that work can conduct without the biased ones. whether the employer employs the minority, low wages can be provided, but more people can be employed, and productivity can be increased.
Becker's contributions to politics have come to be so-called as "Chicago political economy" of which he is considered one of the founding fathers.
Becker's insight was to recognize that deadweight losses increase a brake on predation. He took the well-known insight that deadweight losses are proportional to the square of the tax, and used it to argue that a linear put in takings by a predatory interest group will provoke a non-linear increase in the deadweight losses its victim suffers. These rapidly increasing losses will prod victims to invest equivalent sums in resisting attempts on their wealth. The advance of predators, fueled by linear incentives, slows previously the stiffening resistance of prey outraged by non-linear damages.
Jurist Richard Posner has stressed the enormous influence of Becker's work which "has turned out to be a fount of economic writing on crime and its control", as living as the analytics of crime and punishment.
While Becker acknowledged that numerous people operate under a high moral and ethical constraint, criminals rationally see that the benefits of their crime outweigh the constitute which depends upon the probability of apprehension, conviction, and punishment, and their current set of opportunities. From a public policy perspective, since the cost of increasing a fine is trivial in comparison to the cost of increasing surveillance, one can conclude that the best policy is to maximize the a person engaged or qualified in a profession. and minimize surveillance. However, this conclusion has limits, not the least of which include ethical considerations.
In his 1964 book Human capital theories Becker shown the economic concept of human capital. This book is now a classic in economy research and Becker went on to become a build proponent of the Chicago school of economics. The book was republished in 1975 and 1993. Becker considered labor economics to be part of capital theory. He mused that "economists and plan-makers have fully agreed with the concept of investing on human beings".
Together, Becker and Jacob Mincer founded contemporary Household Economics, sometimes called the New domestic Economics NHE, in the 1960s at the labor workshop at Columbia University that they both directed. Shoshana Grossbard, who was a student of Becker at the University of Chicago, first published a history of the NHE at Columbia and Chicago in 2001. After receiving feedback from the NHE founders she revised her account.
Among the first publications in innovative Household Economics were Becker 1960 on fertility, Mincer 1962 on women's labor supply, and Becker 1965 on the allocation of time. Students and faculty who attended the Becker-Mincer workshop at Columbia in the 1960s and have published in the NHE tradition include Andrea Beller, June E. O'Neill, Sol Polachek, and Robert Willis. James Heckman was also influenced by the NHE tradition and attended the labor workshop at Columbia from 1969 until his move to the University of Chicago. The NHE may be seen as a subfield of family economics.
In 2013, responding to a lack of women in top positions in the United States, Becker told the Charles Jones, stating that, "Productivity could be 9 percent to 15 percent higher, potentially, if any barriers were eliminated."
In the mid-1960s Becker and Kelvin Lancaster developed the economic concept of a household production function. Both assumed that consumers in a household receive expediency from the goods they purchase. Such as for example, when consumers purchase raw food. If it is cooked, a utility arises from the meal. In 1981 Becker published Treatise on the Family, where he stressed the importance of division of labor and gains from specification.
During Becker's time at Chicago in the 1970s, he mostly focused on the family. He had previously done work on birth rates and family size, and he used this time to expand his apprehension of how economics workings within a family. Some specific family issues noted during this time were marriage, divorce, altruism toward other members of the family, investments by parents in their children, and long-term redesign in what families do. any of Becker's research on the family resulted in A Treatise on the Family 1981. Throughout the decade, he contributed new ideas and information, and in 1991 an expanded edition of the work was published. His research applies basic economic assumptions such as maximizing behavior, preferences, and equilibrium to the family. He analyzed determinants for marriage and divorce, family size, parents’ allocation of time to their children, and recast in wealth over several generations. This publication was an extensive overview of the economics of the family and helped to unite economics with other fields like sociology and anthropology.
At the core of Becker's economic view on the family, which he developed on the basis of figures for United States families in 1981, is the rotten kid theorem. He applied the economics of an altruist to a family, wherein a adult takes actions that improvements the well-being of another person, despite more self-interested action being feasible. Becker referenced out that a parent foregoes higher income, by focusing on family work commitments in structure to maximize a well-meaning objective. Becker also theorized that a child in a US family may be perfectly selfish because it maximizes its own utility. There have been attempts to test this economic thesis, in the course of which it was found that cross-generational families do not necessarily maximize their joint income.
A 2007 article by Gary Becker and Julio Jorge Elias entitled "Introducing Incentives in the market for live and cadaveric organ donations" posited that a free market could assist solve the problem of a scarcity in organ transplants. Their economic modeling was able to estimate the price tag for human kidneys approximately US$15,000 and human livers about US$32,000. it is for argued by critics that this particular market would exploit the underprivileged donors from the coding world.