[Gary passed away on May 3, 2014, and I wrote this on May 4, 2014.]
Gary Becker passed away yesterday, and some friends are posting remembrances. Here are some of mine. Gary was extremely friendly and welcoming to assistant professors, and looking back I did not respond as eagerly as I should have because I was somewhat intimidated—it’s hard to know how to respond when a Nobel prize winner asks if you want to play tennis sometime. Once I came to my office on the weekend, and I left my shoes on the carpet outside my office (maybe it was snowing that day?). Gary gently chastised me for imposing externalities on everyone else. Gary was like a walking graduate seminar in that he was always talking about some interesting question (at lunch, walking across campus)—it was immensely educational but sometimes it would devolve into a game among us young people about who could come up with the quickest and most impressive response. Often in these conversations I felt that we would be better off going to our offices and working on the question at hand instead of trying to be fast (and inevitably shallow). Still, when Gary led these discussions (and it wasn’t like he led them purposefully—they naturally flowed out of his curiosity), it was obvious that he felt that an interesting answer could come from anyone.
I used to attend the Becker-Rosen workshop on Monday afternoons, and it was always interesting, but many times I would leave feeling that if we all would specify our models completely (as opposed to just using words), we would all be better off. I remember when Stigler died, Gary said literally three sentences thanking Stigler for his contributions to the workshop—these sentences were precise, heartfelt, and completely unsentimental, and I admired that attitude greatly. Gary used to run an interdisciplinary social science workshop on a weekday night with sociologists, political scientists, etc. and I remember him saying once that he felt that rational choice had really proven to be the best and most useful kind of explanation in social science in general (not just economics). I was impressed by the ambition of this statement (it was made in a humble manner, as if it were self-evident) and I also remember thinking at the time that I didn’t know that we were in some sort of contest. Gary’s Business Week columns were posted near his office, and I have to say that I generally found them uninteresting—they were usually just the conservative talking points of the day and they didn’t really illuminate much about economic reasoning in my opinion.
Chicago was kind of well-known at the time for not being terribly friendly to game theory and more advanced micro techniques, but if I ever personally encountered this attitude, it was from lesser lights (for example, people who taught in the law school). Gary and the senior faculty were always quite open-minded and welcoming. Being at Chicago, I learned that it was not good enough to impress other game theorists; you had to defend your ideas to people who might (quite reasonably) be skeptical. If your idea was not able to defend itself against skeptical and even aggressive questions, then maybe you had better go back and work on it some more.
When I first presented the stuff which became my book Rational Ritual in the Becker-Rosen workshop, I remember getting snickers from some of the visiting professors, hangers-on, etc., which was understandable, as some of the stuff I was talking about (rituals, etc.) was way outside of the normal stuff of economics. Also, my argument was quite explicitly game-theoretic. But Rosen, Becker, and the serious people never snickered. They took it seriously, even if they were not fully convinced. The non-traditional subject matter did not faze them in the least. When I later presented that material at Stanford SITE, a summer conference, afterward one of the senior micro folks at Stanford told me after the talk that my argument “wasn’t very analytical” (it wasn’t Arrow by the way, who is great). I was really miffed by that remark. At Chicago, nobody would say something like that or take that kind of attitude. They might strongly disagree with your argument, but they wouldn’t dismiss it outright because of the way you were making it or because of the subject matter. I began to realize that Chicago was an unusual place. Gary was a big part of that.
When I was a graduate student, I wrote a paper on how people rationally choose to use violence to motivate child laborers and slaves. At one conference, one person came up to me later, distraught, saying that it does not make sense to apply an economic model to children. The idea that violence in child labor could be motivated by economic reasons was quite disturbing to her. I understood this feeling, but I felt at the time that if we really believe that our models work in some areas of life, we shouldn’t give up on our models and reasoning when applying them to unaccustomed areas just because it makes us uncomfortable.
Many people, especially outside of economics, have criticized Becker’s work because it seems quite simplistic to apply rational choice reasoning to things like marriage, having kids, drug addiction, etc. As I have mentioned before, Gary in conversation was extremely open-minded, much more than you would expect if you only read his papers and books. Much of the criticism of Gary’s work argues that it is obvious, self-evident, that reasoning which applies to market transactions does not apply to mate selection, etc. It is a kind of “separate spheres” argument—there are different spheres of human life, and each sphere requires its own kind of reasoning.
Sometimes rational-choice arguments are not very useful and don’t apply well. Just because an argument is a rational choice one does not mean we should favor it a priori. Some of Gary’s papers work better than others. But what I admire most about Gary’s work is the underlying idea that if you really take an idea seriously, you must push it as far as you can. You can’t just say it applies to A, B, and C, but not D because you don’t feel like it. If you have an idea, it is in fact your obligation to push it as far as you can and apply it and test it as widely as you can. Anything less is almost unscientific. If you reach the absurd, at least you are learning something. “Separate spheres” arguments are just an excuse for laziness. Be ambitious and take your own ideas seriously.
Anyhow, sorry for the length of the message! Now I feel bad that I didn’t write something about Rosen and Hurwicz, who passed away before I was on Facebook.