2003: Gary Becker
Gary S. Becker is widely recognized for his expertise in human capital, economics of the family, and economic analysis of crime, discrimination, and population. He is the recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economics for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including non-market behavior.
A featured monthly columnist for BusinessWeek magazine, Dr. Becker served as an economic policy adviser for the Dole Presidential Campaign in 1996, and he received the National Medal of Science in 2000 for his work in social policy.
He is the author of over a dozen books, including the seminal work Human Capital (1964, 3rd ed. 1993), which was awarded the prestigious W.S. Woytinskty Award in 1964. His other books include A Treatise on the Family (1981, expanded edition 1991) and The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (1976). Dr. Becker was editor of Essays in Labor Economics in Honor of H. Gregg Lewis and (with Gilbert Ghez) The Allocation of Time and Goods over the Life Cycle (1975).
He has served as the Arthur Lehman Professor of Economics at Columbia University, University Professor in the departments of Economics, the Graduate School of Business, and the Graduate School of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and as the Rose-Marie and Jack R. Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institute. His other professional activities have included serving as a research associate of the Economics Research Center at the National Opinion Research Center, and as an associate member of the Institute of Fiscal and Monetary Policy for the Ministry of Finance in Japan.
Dr. Becker received an A.B. (summa cum laude) from Princeton University in 1951, an A.M. from the University of Chicago in 1952, and a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1955. He holds honorary doctorate degrees from over fifteen universities, including Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Knox College, Illinois, Princeton, and Columbia.