Economists generally accept as a given the old adage that there's no accounting for tastes. Nobel Laureate Gary Becker disagrees, and in this lively new collection he confronts the problem of preferences and values: how they are formed and how they affect our behavior. He argues that past experiences and social influences form two basic capital stocks: personal and social. He then applies these concepts to assessing the effects of advertising, the power of peer pressure, the nature of addiction, and the function of habits. This framework promises to illuminate many other realms of social life previously considered off-limits by economists.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
[Becker's] achievement has been to create an elegant structure, internally consistent and based on reasonable assumptions, and to use it to generate many testable propositions about how people grapple with the complexities of personal choice...[He] has helped to liberate economics from a straitjacket of oversimplification and narrowness of view.
--David Throsby (Times Literary Supplement )
Gary Becker has used his regular economics column in Business Week to communicate economic truths in plain English and to apply them to the issues of the day...[In this] collection of scholarly essays, Becker applies technically sophisticated economic arguments to work habits, parental altruism and other matters.
--David R. Henderson (Wall Street Journal )
The formation of preferences or tastes and the role tastes play in consumer behavior provide the underlying themes of Accounting for Tastes. Becker's goal in explaining this role is to extend the assumption that individuals behave in ways that maximize utility based on preferences independent of past and future behaviors...Becker's work shows that economic theory can be fruitfully applied to a wide range of questions in the social sciences. He has extended the borders of economics by applying an economic approach to the analysis of a number of questions considered by some to be primarily within the domain of social sciences other than economics...[Accounting for Tastes] is thought provoking.
--Peggy S. Berger (Journal of Consumer Affairs )
--David Throsby (Times Literary Supplement )
Gary Becker has used his regular economics column in Business Week to communicate economic truths in plain English and to apply them to the issues of the day...[In this] collection of scholarly essays, Becker applies technically sophisticated economic arguments to work habits, parental altruism and other matters.
--David R. Henderson (Wall Street Journal )
The formation of preferences or tastes and the role tastes play in consumer behavior provide the underlying themes of Accounting for Tastes. Becker's goal in explaining this role is to extend the assumption that individuals behave in ways that maximize utility based on preferences independent of past and future behaviors...Becker's work shows that economic theory can be fruitfully applied to a wide range of questions in the social sciences. He has extended the borders of economics by applying an economic approach to the analysis of a number of questions considered by some to be primarily within the domain of social sciences other than economics...[Accounting for Tastes] is thought provoking.
--Peggy S. Berger (Journal of Consumer Affairs )
About the Author
Gary S. Becker is University Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Chicago. In 1992, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.
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- The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society by Regenia Gagnier on 6 pages
- Liberal Education in a Knowledge Society by Barry Smith on 4 pages
- The Monochrome Society (New Forum Books) by Amitai Etzioni in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
- Ideology and Utopia in the Social Philosophy of the Libertarian Economists (Contributions in Economics and Economic History) by Rick Tilman on page 123, page 146, and page 150
- Rational Lives: Norms and Values in Politics and Society (American Politics and Political Economy Series) by Dennis Chong in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
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