Böcker av Gary S. Becker

"As an economist and a public intellectual, Gary Becker was a giant. He won a Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work in human capital, the John Bates Clark Medal as the best American economist under 40, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contributions to public life and welfare. He is regarded by many as the greatest microeconomist in the field's history. After a 44-year career at the University of Chicago, Becker left a slew of manuscripts, projects, and speeches that were half-formed or never published. These papers offer glimpses both of his famed process and of the personality-direct, critical, curious-that make him a beloved figure in economics and far beyond. An Economic Approach collects and annotates these extant unpublished works as a capstone to the Becker oeuvre-not because the works are perfect, but because they offer an illuminating and deeply instructive glimpse into the mind and process of an economist who was always on. Longtime collaborator Richard Posner once described Becker a marathon runner of economic thought-forever chasing a big finish line, never stopping at artificial milestones along the way. An Economic Approach carries the flame of a great mind that was never motivated by publications, but whose spirit of inquiry will be forever relevant"--

On December 5, 2004, the still-developing blogosphere took one of its biggest steps toward mainstream credibility, as Nobel Prize - winning economist Gary S Becker and renowned jurist and legal scholar Richard A Posner announced the formation of the Becker-Posner Blog. This book gathers the most important and innovative entries from the blog.

Becker argues that past experiences and social influences form two basic capital stocks, personal and social, and applies these concepts to assessing the effects of advertising, the power of peer pressure, the nature of addiction, and the function of habits.

The authors offer an analytic framework for measuring how people make choices, including social environment with standard goods and services in their utility functions. These functions enable analysis of how changes in social environment affect choice, and provide a way of analyzing how social environment is determined by individuals' interactions.

A study of how investment in an individual's education and training is similar to business investments in equipment. This edition has four new chapters, covering topics including: human capital, fertility and economic growth, the division of labour and economic considerations within the family.

Using the basic economic assumptions of maximizing behavior, stable preferences, and arid equilibria in explicit or implicit markets, Becker applies economic theory to the most sensitive and fateful personal decisions, such as choosing a spouse or having children.