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The Economic Way of Looking at Behavior: The Nobel Lecture (Essays in Public Policy)

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Becker speaks in his Nobel lecture on four areas in which his work has centered. investments in human capital

behavior of the family (or household), including distribution of work and allocation of time in the family,crime and punishment,discrimination on the markets for labor and goods.

One of his areas of focus is on the rising value of time due to economic growth. He explains lower fertility rates on this basis.He also analyses divorce data and makes the conclusion that more wealthy families have fewer divorces precisely because the cost to them is much greater.

He makes observations about Crime which see the activity as often being the result of a rational calculus. He analyses the situations of minorities in societies and says when a minority is a small one dicrimination harms it, and not the larger society. But when a minority becomes large enough discrimination proves detrimental to minority and majority alike.

I do not have the tools to truly analyze or even understand Becker's work. Thus all I have done here is to mention a few of the major points of his work.

Becker at an economics panel discussion at the University of Chicago in 2003

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Becker has written his view over the scope and method of economic analysis. And he argues that economics is a particular way in analyzing human behavior. This is an excellent presntation on the meaning of economics.