Pottsville-born Nobel prize-winning economist Gary S. Becker profoundly influenced economics by using its rational analysis to study ordinary human behavior, several economics professors said Monday.
"He was able to take economic concepts and apply them to topics people had not used economic analysis on," said Margarita Rose, chairwoman of the economics department at King's College, Wilkes-Barre.
Those topics included marriage and even suicide, she said.
"He looked at that decision making from an economic point of view," said Rose, who has used Becker's study on the market for marriage in her class. "I think he applied economics to social topics like suicide. That was something no one had done before."
Becker, 83, a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago, died Saturday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago. He received his Nobel Prize in economic sciences in 1992 for applying principles from his field to a variety of human behaviors, including marriage, child-bearing and crime.
He was born on Dec. 2, 1930, in Pottsville, a son of Louis and Anna Becker. His father operated Becker's Army and Navy Store, 319 N. Centre St., before the family moved to Mount Holly, New Jersey, when the future Nobel Laureate was 4 or 5 years old.
Farhad Saboori, a professor of economics at Albright College, Reading, said that before Becker, economists tended to shy away from issues of right and wrong.
"Economists have traditionally found it easier to deal with issues from a positive point of view," he said.
Becker, however, broke that mold, using economic tools to deal with issues traditionally believed to be noneconomic ones, Saboori said.
"It was controversial," Saboori said. "He was able to bring very powerful tools of economic analysis to social problems of society. He provided a very rich field of research."
Saboori said he, like Rose, uses Becker's writings in his classes.
"I use of lot of his (work)," Saboori said. "I do use a lot of his approach."
One of Saboori's colleagues, Associate Professor of Economics Lisa Wilder, also thinks Becker continues to have significant influence on economic thought.
"Becker was revolutionary in the way he applied economic thinking to questions traditionally outside of economics. His methods and applications are important today as tools to understand important decisions we make and to help us devise effective social policies," she said. "He looked at important issues like discrimination and education and put social questions in the framework that economists use to approach many different topics. He considered marriage, the impact of changing women's roles on fertility, the reasons for continuing discrimination and crime."
Bloomsburg University Professor of Economics Nakul Kumar also said Becker's work broke new ground.
"Becker was a pioneer in using tools of economic analysis to study ... decisions of individuals," he said.
One example Kumar cited was in discrimination, where Becker showed that those who discriminate in a free-market economy will suffer because of their actions.
M. Halim Dalgin, a professor of economics at Kutztown University, disagrees with some of Becker's conclusions but acknowledges his importance. Becker's teaching of both economics and sociology is no coincidence in Dalgin's eyes.
"He's the guy ... in the juncture of economics and sociology," Dalgin said of Becker. "He got into family life, why women get into the workforce. These are the topics not in the usual economic agenda."
Dalgin said Becker's analyses assumed people behaved rationally, and that is where he parts company with him.
"We are more than calculating machines," he said. "There are so many other factors. Is everything really reducible to dollars?"
Wilder said Becker holds a powerful influence at Albright.
"His methods and examples are commonly used throughout our economics classrooms as they both demonstrate the power of economic thinking and help us understand issues and questions that are relevant to every person," she said.