Gary Becker Quotes

#1. Fines are preferable to imprisonment and other types of punishment because they are more efficient. With a fine, the punishment to offenders is also revenue to the State.

Gary Becker

#2. I am saying that the economic approach provides a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behaviour

Gary Becker

#3. Still, intuitive assumptions about behavior is only the starting point of systematic analysis, for alone they do not yield many interesting implications.

Gary Becker

#4. Even a wizard would have a great deal of difficulty repealing the economic law that higher minimum wages reduce employment. Since politicians are not wizards, they should not try.

Gary Becker

#5. Why in almost all societies have married women specialized in bearing and rearing children and in certain agricultural activities, whereas married men have done most of the fighting and market work?

Gary Becker

#6. Along with others, I have tried to pry economists away from narrow assumptions about self interest. Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences.

Gary Becker

#7. The Treatise tries to analyze not only modern Western families, but also those in other cultures and the changes in family structure during the past several centuries.

Gary Becker

#8. A stronger yuan could lead to greater Chinese asset accumulation in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Gary Becker

#9. Different constraints are decisive for different situations, but the most fundamental constraint is limited time.

Gary Becker

#10. Economy is the art of making the most of life.

Gary Becker

#11. My work on human capital began with an effort to calculate both private and social rates of return to men, women, blacks, and other groups from investments in different levels of education.

Gary Becker

#12. I was not sympathetic to the assumption that criminals had radically different motivations from everyone else.

Gary Becker