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 inves…

- Gary Becker

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…

- Gary Becker

Even a wizard would have a great deal of difficulty repealing the economic law that higher minimum wages reduce employment. Since politicians are not…

- Gary Becker

Human capital analysis starts with the assumption that individuals decide on their education, training, medical care, and other additions to knowledg…

- Gary Becker

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

- Gary Becker

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

- Gary Becker

Still, intuitive assumptions about behavior is only the starting point of systematic analysis, for alone they do not yield many interesting implicati…

- Gary Becker

The most fundamental constraint is limited time

- Gary Becker

Why in almost all societies have married women specialized in bearing and rearing children and in certain agricultural activities, whereas married me…

- Gary Becker