Faculty Smackdown- Prof. Gary Becker
Prof. Becker on Economics, Sports and the Nobel Prize
Andrew Van Fossen, '06
Issue date: 2/2/06 Section: GSB Life
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Gary Becker: Yeah, I was a pretty good handball player, but the handball team was meeting at the same time as the math team. I was better at handball in those days than math, but I felt the future was better in math.
CB: Did your social standing in school increase when you joined the math team?
GB: It didn't increase, let me tell you that. It wasn't the most prestigious of activities.
CB: And then you went to Princeton. Did you know John Nash [subject of the movie "A Beautiful Mind"]?
GB: Yes. He was a graduate student when I was an undergrad. He was clearly very smart, but more than that, unlike most mathematicians, he had an interest in economics and was quite good at it.
CB: How did you develop an interest in economics?
GB: Well, it came out of my interest in math surprisingly. I happened to take, almost by accident, a course in economics. Our text book used simple math to analyze problems in microeconomics. That really attracted me; I saw I could use math and talk about social problems.
CB: What was one of the first social problems you applied economics to?
GB: My junior thesis was on international trade. I will actually lecture on this in our course this quarter.
CB: What were some of your favorite courses in college other than math or econ, some fun courses?
GB: I don't know if I had any fun courses. I did like a course on Russian novelists-Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
CB: Do you have a favorite book from one of them?
GB: My favorite was "The Idiot". I sat up all night finishing it. It left me . . . well it was a real downer, but I thought it was just a great book. Of course Tolstoy's "War and Peace" is a great book as well, although it's very long. I found I skimmed through a lot of that one.
CB: And then you came to the University of Chicago.
GB: Yes, I was a graduate student here.
CB: Milton Freidman was one of your professors?
GB: He was the most important influence on me. He was my professor in the basic sequence in price theory. What he did for me was open my mind to see how economics could be used to solve a lot of important problems.
CB: Was it then that the idea of applying economics to non-traditional issues took place?