Bill Black — Gary Becker’s Nobel Prize for Getting It all Wrong: The Family

George Stigler celebrated Gary Becker as theoclassical economics’ schwerpunkt that led their blitzkrieg assault on other social sciences. Stigler proudly called economics the “Imperial” discipline. The idea that imperialism was a desirable trait is a typical example of Stigler’s blindness to history and human suffering. Stigler famously proclaimed that economics alone was actually a social “science” because only it had a theory of human motivation (maximizing self-interest)....

In this five part series I discuss these four areas and Becker’s role with regard to financial crises. Stigler was incorrect about other social sciences lacking a theory of human motivation or ignoring rationality and incentives. The series will become part of the book that I am co-authoring with Wesley Marshall on economists and economics that studies the manifold failures of recipients of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize. Theoclassical economics’ reductionist dogma of human motivation is one of its great weaknesses of these Prize winners. One of the ironies that I will develop in this series of articles about Becker’s embarrassing forays into other disciplines is that he abandons the dogma that all behavior is self-interested in his work on the family, uses the dogma in the fields of crime and addiction where it makes particularly poor sense and produces a series of errors, and inadvertently demonstrates the circularity of the dogma in his work on discrimination and on “rational addiction.”

New Economic Perspectives
Gary Becker’s Nobel Prize for Getting It all Wrong: The Family
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Theoclassical economics can simultaneously shrink the “pie” and in the infamous words of Citicorp’s ode to “plutonomy”:

“In a plutonomy there … are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the ‘non-rich’, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.”

Becker never evinced the slightest understanding of how discrimination systematically denies its victims the ability to make “the most of life.”

Bill does an excellent job of showing how Becker was both an intellectual fool and an ideological tool, not to mention being emotionally impoverished and morally deviant*. So much for his "rationality." And as Bill adds, "I need to emphasize that I am not making any of this up." Summary, "All of this is incoherent and bizarre."

On the Nobel Sveriges Riksbank Prize: "Economics is the only discipline in which one can achieve top honors for being proven disastrously wrong and having relied on obvious logical and theoretical flaws and abundant evidence."

*Confounding morality with efficiency is deviant. It is tantamount to claiming that morality is amorality. But such is the logic of maximizing self-interest "rationally."