In memoriam: Gary Becker
One of the world's most influential economists, Nobel laureate Gary Becker has passed away this week at the age of 84. Becker was a professor at the University of Chicago, Department of Economics and Sociology. He was an active economics blogger with his last post dating from only two months ago. He held the blog together with his friend and colleague Richard Posner, also a professor at the University of Chicago. It was a very good blog and I for one will surely miss his insightful posts. "My teachers taught me that economics was not a game played by clever academics, but a serious subject that helped us understand the real world we lived in." Becker received the Nobel prize in economics in 1992 for “having extended the domain of economic theory to aspects of human behavior which had previously been dealt with—if at all—by other social science disciplines such as sociology, demography and criminology.” Essentially he introduced economic thinking and reasoni...