This is one of a series of posts that will ask what the most pertinent question raised by a prominent influencer of political economy might have been, and what the relevance of that question might be today. There is a list of all posts in the series at the end of each entry. The origin of this series is noted here.
After the first two posts in this series, the topics have been chosen by me, and this is one of those. This series has been produced using what I describe as directed AI searches to establish positions with which I agree, followed by final editing before publication.
This post refers to Gary Becker, who was awarded the so-called Nobel Prize for economics in 1992.
He is on this series because he has a unique place in the development of my own thinking on political economy. I first came across his work when I was an undergraduate student, and for the first time, I thought that someone who was obviously considered pre-eminent in his field was completely and utterly stupid. I was, frankly, baffled as to why the papers I was asked to read had been published in journals like the American Economic Review. Nothing he said made any sense to me. It was utterly unrelated to the reality I was already aware of.
If my tutors had intended to set me on the journey of disbelief in neoliberal economics that I have pursued ever since, they could not have done better. Becker is a man who has won all the awards, yet in my opinion, has done nothing to advance human well-being as a consequence.
Gary Becker was one of the most influential and, in my opinion, dangerous economists of the twentieth century. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1992, he extended the reach of economics far beyond markets and money. In his hands, economic reasoning became a universal language: marriage, education, crime, discrimination, even love were treated as problems of rational calculation.
Becker's claim was audacious. He argued that all human behaviour could be understood as the pursuit of utility under constraints. Criminals, parents, students, and lovers all acted like miniature firms, maximising benefit and minimising cost. What had once been the domain of sociology, ethics, and philosophy became, under Becker's pen, a branch of microeconomics.
This intellectual invasion created a new orthodoxy: the economic imperialism which still defines neoliberal thought. But it also created an emptiness at the heart of social life. Hence, the Gary Question: if every human action is reduced to market logic and self-interest, what remains of society, morality, or meaning?
Economics as a total worldview
Becker's project was to universalise economics. He claimed that the same logic explaining why a firm hires workers could explain why a parent invests in a child's education.
Time became “human capital.”
Love became a form of “investment.”
Crime became an outcome of a “cost-benefit analysis.”
By treating every decision as rational optimisation, Becker eliminated the distinction between economic and social behaviour. Everything became a market. Everyone became an entrepreneur of the self.
It was, in its way, a brilliant intellectual move, for which he won the Nobel Prize, but it was also a profoundly corrosive one.
The death of the social sphere
When all relationships are modelled as transactions, solidarity disappears:
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Friendship becomes networking.
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Marriage becomes a contract of mutual advantage.
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Education becomes a private investment, not a public good.
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Crime becomes a miscalculation, not a symptom of social breakdown.
Becker's logic turned every relationship into an economic equation. It severed the moral fibres that hold communities together. Where once we saw duty, loyalty, or care, Becker taught us to see incentives and costs. The consequence was the slow death of the social imagination.
The commodification of life
By making all values measurable in prices, Becker's framework legitimised the commodification of everything.
If education is a private investment, why should it be free?
If health is an individual benefit, why should it be universal?
If the environment is an externality, why not trade its destruction in carbon markets?
The expansion of economic reasoning becomes a justification for privatisation. What cannot be priced is dismissed as sentimental; what cannot be owned is neglected. Becker's legacy is a world where markets invade every sphere of life, from childcare to climate.
Rationality as ideology
Becker's defenders called him realistic: he recognised that people respond to incentives. But his vision of rationality was not descriptive; it was prescriptive. He assumed that people should act like calculators and then built policies around that fiction.
The result was what might be called the demoralisation of markets. Efficiency replaced empathy. Crime policy became about deterrence rather than justice. Welfare policy became about incentives, and not solidarity. Education became a competition, and not a right.
Under Becker's influence, social policy ceased to be about what was good and became about what was efficient.
The politics of individualisation
Becker's universe leaves no room for consequences, only choices. Poverty becomes a series of bad decisions, not a system of exploitation. Inequality becomes the product of skill differentials, and not power.
This individualisation is politically convenient. It absolves governments of responsibility and sanctifies markets as neutral arbiters. It tells the poor they are free to compete, free to fail, and free to blame themselves because they are supposedly solely responsible for who they are.
Becker's rational actor is not a model of humanity; it is the ideological mask of neoliberalism.
What Becker missed
Becker ignored everything that cannot be quantified: love, trust, belonging, community, culture, and history. He mistook what can be measured for what matters. By reducing humanity to cost-benefit analysis, he stripped life of moral texture.
People are not firms.
Societies are not markets.
Justice cannot be priced.
Solidarity cannot be incentivised.
The very attempt to do so is a moral catastrophe disguised as science.
What answering Becker requires
To answer the Becker Question, we must reclaim the moral and social spaces that economics colonised. That means:
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Restoring the idea of the common good. Policy should begin from shared purpose, not private gain.
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Re-embedding markets in society. Markets are tools, not metaphysics. They must serve human ends.
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Redefining value which requires that we recognise that care, education, and ecological balance are forms of value that money cannot measure.
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Reasserting ethics, which would bring moral reasoning back into economics as its foundation, not its afterthought.
Inference
The Becker Question forces us to confront what neoliberal economics has done to our moral imagination. By treating every human act as a transaction, it has hollowed out meaning itself. The market has become not just a mechanism, but a metaphor for life.
But a society that measures everything by price loses the capacity to value anything at all.
Becker's triumph was to make economics total; his failure was to make humanity partial.
To rebuild meaning, we must break the monopoly of market logic and remember that not everything that counts can be counted.
Economics must once again become a branch of moral philosophy, or it will continue to destroy the society it claims to explain.
We need, in other words, to forget that Becker ever happened, and all that he said.
Previous posts in this series
- The economic questions
- Economic questions: The Henry Ford Question
- Economic questions: The Mark Carney Question
- Economics questions: The Keynes question
- Economics questions: The Karl Marx question
- Economics questions: the Milton Friedman question
- Economic questions: The Hayek question
- Economic questions: The James Buchanan question
- Economic questions: The J K Galbraith question
- Economic questions: the Hyman Minsky question
- Economic questions: the Joseph Schumpeter question
- Economic questions: The E F Schumacher question
- Economics questions: the John Rawls question
- Economic questions: the Thomas Piketty question
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Might a possibly unstated foundation of Mr Becker’s dehumanising of “economics” be the separation of “economics” from the society in which, in both theory and practice, it functions/distorts?
Might any “Economics” wnich does not include social consequences be faulty in its stated or unstated premise/premises and, consequently, be fundamentally flawed?
Yes, in a word.
Thank you, I had never heard of Gary Becker until now.
I failed to mark his Nobel Prize in 1992 – I was too busy proving him wrong (young, in love and about to get married with no thought of the economics).
🙂
I first got really angry with him in 1978. It’s never gone away.
I really like the fact that you have named someone whose views you entirely disagree with. It is almost too easy just to reference people who you agree with or have had a positive influence on you. I have a similar view to you on Becker.
I had the option of doing my degree in engineering and economics (or just engineering) which was very appealing until I read some of Becker’s work and then decided – admittedly in a not very intellectual way – that it was (apologies) ‘bollocks’ and pseudo-scientific…and, arguably, pseudo-intellectual. Possibly the arrogance of youth? However, despite my complete rejection of Becker’s (and some others) views on economics I still retain an interest in economics / political economy, etc., but still have never got round to formally studying it. I’m not sure I ever will? Principally, because it would frustrate me as a student (a very old student by now) to be continually arguing against so much of what is held to be right by the economics establishment (e.g., Becker, Friedman, Hayek) and/or is portrayed as academically rigorous. I will, however, continue to work against the docile acceptance of neoliberal dogma, the prevailing household analogy nonsense, etc., and try to get people to open their eyes to the widespread social manipulation that is being orchestrated in the interests of neoliberal beneficiaries and, hopefully, to the other options available such as MMT, the vital importance of addressing poverty, etc.
I was dumbfounded when Becker won the Nobel prize for economics. In a bizarre way, I felt my decision not to study it was proven to be the correct decision.
I agree with the comment that Zack Polanski is a refreshing change and is at least articulating options to neoliberalism. We need more people to speak out and to create a new powerful narrative that becomes a compelling story making the fight against poverty, improving social justice and well-being for all the ‘hero’ against the neoliberal elites (since all good stories need a ‘baddie’).
We appear to be kindred spirits.
His receipt of the Nobel prize for economics demonstrates the utter uselessness of the whole Nobel prize pantomime whether in economics, literature, science etc. and especially the so-called Peace Prize. Should we not take the means by which Nobel acquired wealth and blow the whole pantomime to smithereens? At present it risks giving credibility to the incredible.
The truly worrying thing is that his ideas have resonated with enough people that they have become mainstream.
You have to turn Becker on his head really don’t you?
Let’s look at others ways of being rational:
Is it rational to destroy your means of life? (Pollute/despoil the planet/create global warming – No).
Is it rational to subject yourself to high prices of the basic things you need? (Inflation – No)
Is it rational to destroy your financial viability because of illness? (Private health care? – No)
Is it rational to let the market determine your house prices and rents? (I think not)
Is it rational to expect a being such as a human who has a concept of his or her own death to be 100% rational all of the time? (No).
Is it rational to marry someone whom you find physically repugnant just for the money? Eeughhh……..
Is it rational to defend your livelihood and jobs by joining a union? (Yes, because capital wants your outputs for itself).
Is it rational to allow inequality and austerity to make people upset and angry? (No – it leads to fascism and undemocracy, and death).
Is it rational to allow ex-private bankers to run the central banks (No – their loyalty is to the private sector banks that made them; their domain knowledge of the public sector is negligible).
Is it rational for voters to vote for politicians who look after them? (Yes it is, which is why the rich fund political parties to ensure that THEY come first before anyone else).
Is it rational to cut benefits to people who have so little to spend? (No – their spending is someone else wages, that is the economy right there Rachel please note).
Is it rational when offshoring your money to pay charges to keep it hidden when you could just pay the tax? (Yes – dummy. I mean, what’s the difference?).
Yeah ‘rational’ eh. I’m sure others can provide examples. I think many people are rational in wanting an NHS, decent rents, good pay and pensions, a future for their kids etc. All that is about survival, and rational self interest. Who are these economists who think they can re-write human history? The arrogance.
Tell me – is the surname ‘Becker’ etymologically related to the word ‘wanker’? Up yours Gary!
Very good. I like it.
You’re welcome.
And speaking of which, I hope that I am not overstaying mine.
You’re always welcome
Unfortunately, some of the things on you list would certainly be seen as rational, PSR – such as marrying someone whose physically repugnant for the money (perhaps we could ask Melania Trump?) and house prices and rent – by those disciples and Becker, of which there are many. But, yes, lots aren’t. But then when modeling using the Becker approach you simply factor them out. That’s the way modeling in economics works, as I’m sure you know.
It isn’t just in economics that the moral foundations have vanished. Popper destroyed the concept of truth in science, substituting “not yet disproved”. Moral philosophers have undermined the concept of “real” ethics. Christian writers have abandoned the old-fashioned idea that morals are God-given, and replaced it with humanistic individualism. Atheists rely on “Just-So” stories about human evolution to validate any kind of ethics. And so on. Clever and irresponsible people have destroyed much of our intellectual foundation without any substitutes. This is the real “trahison des clercs”.
You generalise, far too much. And what is the treason to which you refer? I am not convinced your claim stacks. The fact that we live with uncertainty, undoubtedly, does not mean we are directionless, and yet that is what I think you imply the reason represents. I do not agree. Quantum thinking would suggest otherwise. Because we cannot know everything does but mean we know nothing. All it says is that certainty is beyond us. That is very different from what I think you are saying.
The funny thing is, when I look around me at human behaviour (unfiltered by the media, etc, which for obvious reasons does not report on peaceful and reasonably contented lives) what I see is precisely the opposite of Becker’s observations. I see people everywhere resisting the encroachment of market values – not reproducing capitalist relations in their families or communities. If my lawnmower breaks down I go and borrow my neighbour’s, and he happily gives it. He doesn’t charge rent. Who would? – and if anybody did, they’d soon be bottom of their community’s estimation.
There used to be an advert on British television, in which a little girl tries to buy a bar of chocolate as a present for her Mum, using some buttons she has collected. The initially grumpy, but, it turns out, kindly shopkeeper takes these in payment – giving her back in ‘change’ the one clearly most precious to her. So there you have it: even the arch marketeers, the Mad Men, know they need to associate their product not with market transactions, but human kindness.
🙂
I must admit I had never heard of Becker, but he has a lot to answer for. If I were to evaluate my life so far, I would honestly say that I have lived a life of great privilege. However, most people would ascribe that to having worked on yachts and traveled extensively in the way that I did throughout most of my life. But I have a totally different take on what privilege means to me. In reality, I faced many serious challenges during my travels, as I careened between extremes, also experiencing failure, depression, poverty and even destitution at times.
For me the greatest privileges I ever experienced were in caring for other people as this provided real meaning to my existence. My first experience as a medical volunteer in South Dade after Hurricane Andrew, led to a major career change when I got my first job working in an overwhelmed public facility, the ER at Jackson Memorial in Miami. After training as a surgical tech, it was a real privilege to work in a job that I absolutely loved in surgery at Johns Hopkins. However, I will never regret raising the issues that got me fired as a whistleblower, as this was my solemn duty to protect our patients.
Possibly my greatest ‘privilege’ was the incredible experience of spending six months as a medical volunteer in Aceh, Indonesia after the boxing day tsunami. Despite great frustration and hardship after returning to the UK, I had the immense privilege of taking care of my mother for the final few years of her life. I also believe that when someone takes the time to share their knowledge, or teach you a new skill, it’s equivalent to providing you with wealth far beyond anything money could buy. We all need to evaluate what has brought a genuinely tangible value to our life; for me this was never a pile of cash!
Thanks for sharing.