Gary Becker

Gary Becker

Gary S. Becker, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science in 1992, is the Rose-Marie and Jack R. Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and University Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is an expert in human capital, economics of the family, and economic analysis of crime, discrimination, and population. His current research focuses on habits and addictions, formation of preferences, human capital, and population growth. He is a featured monthly columnist for Business Week magazine and is one of the initial fellows of the Society of Labor Economists. In addition to being a Nobel laureate, Becker is a recipient of the 2007 Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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    • Restrictions on Campaign Contributions—A Good Thing?

    | April 08, 2012 | 4:40 pm

    Posner is clearly correct that the analytical differences between “super Pacs” and direct campaign contributions to candidates are not large enough to justify disparate treatments. Yet, because they should be treated the same way does not necessarily imply that spending by super Pacs should also be sharply controlled. I believe that it is very likely  preferable to apply the reasoning in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to direct contributions than to extend the limits on direct contribution to super Pacs.

    I agree with Posner that candidates with political positions attractive to rich individuals may obtain considerable funds that give these candidates political advantages in appealing to voters. Such political contributions may well also affect the policies supported by candidates and elected officials. This is the corruption issue raised by Posner and by much of the literature that supports sharply limiting campaign contributions.

    Sharp restrictions on campaign contributions would make more sense if monetary contributions were the only major force that shapes who wins elections and the policies goverment officials support.Yet that is very far from the situation that prevails in American politics, and in the politics of most other democratic nations. One reason for this is that interest groups can often avoid the intent of restrictions on campaign contributions through other ways to influence political outcomes. For example, many industries hire lobbyists and spend other monies to try to persuade legislators, regulators, and others in important political positions to subsidize their industries, or to reduce the taxes on their industries, or to gain other advantages.

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    Are Too Many People in Prison?

    | April 07, 2012 | 1:11 pm

    Does imprisonment reduce crime? Yes.

    Do many crimes cause considerable harm and hardships to victims? Yes.

    Does America imprison too many people? In light of my answers so far, you might expect my response to this question to be no. But it is a strong yes.

    Imprisonment reduces crimes against the general public, if only because of the incapacitation effect; that is, people in prison cannot commit crimes against the public (they can and do commit many crimes against other prisoners). For certain crimes, imprisonment is also a deterrent, so that potential offenders are kept from committing crimes by the prospects of prison terms, especially when there is a good probability of being caught.

    On the other hand, imprisonment also raises the likelihood that some prisoners will commit crimes when they are released because their skills at legal employment eroded while in prisons, or they learned in prison how to be better criminals, or they become blacklisted for certain jobs, or other reasons. Nevertheless, a study on the decline in crime by economist Steven Levitt, along with other research, finds that on balance imprisonment reduces crime. The main disagreement is whether the whole effect of imprisonment on crimes comes from the incapacitation effect or whether some is also due to deterrence. I believe deterrence is also at work.

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    Fracking and Self-Sufficiency in Gas and Oil

    | April 03, 2012 | 7:01 pm

    More or less every American president starting with Dwight Eisenhower, and prioritized by Richard Nixon, called for American self-sufficiency in energy sources. In fact, America is now about self-sufficient in natural gas, and America’s oil imports have declined as a fraction of its total oil consumption from a peak of 60% in 2005 to about 50% in 2011. Part of the decline is due to the Great Recession’s effects on US output and automobile use. Another part is due to rising prices of oil that reduced oil imports, but increased spending on these imports. A third and growing part is due to increased domestic production of oil and especially gas that is likely to continue to grow rapidly during the next decade.

    The main reason for the expansion in domestic gas and oil production is a technique called “hydraulic fracking”. Texas wildcatter George Mitchell was the most important person responsible for the development of the fracking method to extract gas from shale formations in the 1980s. This method uses large quantities of water under high pressure with added chemicals to crack open rocks and extract the gas, and sometimes oil, hidden in these rocks. The cost of using fracking for natural gas extraction has become so competitive that most US natural gas production comes from fracking. As a result, the price of natural gas has fallen from a peak of about $10.80 per million BTUs to $2.20 currently. Instead of building terminals that could import liquefied natural gas, energy companies are now trying to export more natural gas. US natural gas inventories are so bloated there is a possibility that the price temporarily could be forced down toward $0, or even to a negative level.

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    Should K-12 Teachers Have Tenure?

    | March 19, 2012 | 7:19 am

    The traditional case for tenure at the university level rests on two pillars. The first and most prominent is that this gives professors freedom to express unpopular views in their writings and lectures. The second is that professors in the same field are the best ones to judge the qualifications and promise of potential new hires and existing colleagues. This is why departments rather than central administrators choose who to hire and who to let go. Tenure insures the existence of a core of faculty with a long-term commitment to their departments who make the hiring and firing decisions. For reasons I have expressed elsewhere (see my 1/15/06 “Comment on Tenure”), I do not believe that these arguments are powerful enough to justify the rigidities introduced by having the tenure system at colleges and universities. Whether that conclusion is correct or not, neither of these arguments made for having tenure in higher education has close applicability to teachers at the K-12 level. They publish very little, and mainly teach materials that are not controversial. There are exceptions, such as teachers of Israeli-Palestinian relations, or theories of evolution, but teaching materials of this type are exceptions and not the rule. The second reason used to justify tenure at the university level, that senior colleagues are the ones with the qualifications to choose new hires and to decide who to hold on to in their departments, is not applicable at the K-12 level. For unlike what happens at universities, administrators at K-12 schools, such as principals, do the hiring, not teachers with tenure. Since administrators (or older teachers) cannot readily judge which of the hires will turn out to be good teachers, that provides a strong reason why K-12 teachers should not get tenure, especially not after only a short time of teaching. Continue reading Gary Becker…

    (photo credit: SS&SS)

    On the Apparently Growing Class Divide and What can be Done About it

    | March 12, 2012 | 8:05 am

    The US has traditionally stood for a large amount of equality of opportunity, at least among whites. This implies that the success of children would depend mainly on their ability and energy, and much less so on their parents’ incomes and education. This has always been an aspiration rather than a fact, and the disturbing evidence in several studies indicates that equality of opportunity has declined by a lot during the past half century. In a recent book, Coming Apart, Charles Murray highlights this apparent fact with interesting statistics.

    Another way to state what has happened during the past half century is that the degree of mobility between generations has apparently declined. The evidence suggests that children of successful parents are more likely to be successful relative to others of their own generation than was true in the first half of the 20th century. One important reason for this, I believe, is that education is now a much more important determinant of economic success than it was in 1960. Educated parents have always been much better than parents with relatively little education at preparing their children to succeed at school. This difference in preparation of children is now more important because greater education has become more necessary to succeed in the modern knowledge-driven American economy.

    One approach to thinking about the causes of this trend is to divide employment opportunities into good and bad jobs. Some discussions assume, implicitly or explicitly, that the number of good jobs is rather fixed, that many individuals of different classes are capable of filling these good jobs, and hence that who gets the better jobs depends on contacts, influence, and credentials, like having a college degree. On this approach to labor markets, children of upper class parents-those with greater income and education- are more likely to succeed now than in the past because their overall education and other “credentials” have increased compared to those of children from the lower classes.

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    Traditional Bookstores and Libraries are Doomed by the Internet

    | March 05, 2012 | 9:09 am

    It has been recognized for at least a decade that traditional bookstores and newspapers are essentially doomed by the growth of the Internet and digitization. Doomed also are postal systems, record albums, movie theatres, and most other traditional ways of providing information, entertainment, and other content to consumers. To take the US postal system as an example, after growing for many decades, the number of pieces of first class mail declined by 25% in past few years alone.

    Even hard copies of books, newspapers, and films are beginning to go the way of bookstores and theatres. Millions of books and thousands of films are available online or in other digital forms, where they can be read or watched by almost unlimited numbers of consumers. Reading a book in digital form has a few disadvantages, such as it is more difficult to make notations in margins, although developments in software are making digital notations much easier. Moreover, with digitization one can have access to many books in a very light Kindle, or in an IPad that weighs only a few pounds, and also has many other uses.

    One may lament the closing of many local bookstores, post offices, and movie theatres, and the sharp decline of giants in the newspaper business like the Washington Post, but the reasons for these changes are both clear and irreversible. Anyone with access to the Internet, and this access is rapidly growing worldwide, can much more readily order a book online than by going to buy it in a bookstore. Similarly, constant updates on the weather, sports, and news are more readily available online than from newspapers, or even from television.

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    (photo credit: MorBCN)

    Is China’s Economic Future a Rosy One?

    | February 27, 2012 | 9:26 am

    Starting with the opening of agriculture to private incentives in the late 1970s, China has experienced faster and more prolonged economic growth than any other country. In a mere three decades China has moved from a very poor nation to a middle-income level country, a development that pulled hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty. China’s aggregate GDP is now second in the world only to that of the US. While its per capita income is still much smaller than that of America’s, many are predicting that even China’s per capita GDP will surpass that of the US in a few decades.

    Perhaps, but let us not yet get carried away too quickly. Two other predictions in recent decades of countries beating the US are a reminder that projections of continued trends in income growth can be way off the mark. In 1956, Khrushchev proclaimed that the Soviet Union would bury the US, not militarily but economically. One might at the time have dismissed this as the exaggerations of a loud and belligerent leader, but similar predictions were common among mainstream economists. Various editions of Paul Samuelson’s best selling textbook Economics: An Introductory Analysis predicted that by a certain date the Soviet Union’s GDP would exceed that of the US, but each later addition delayed the date of overtaking. In the latest additions, that prediction was dropped from the book since by then it appeared ludicrous. As everyone knows, the Soviet’s centrally planned economy collapsed by the end of the 1980s, and Russian per capita and aggregate income remain far below America’s.

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    (photo credit: Kai Yan, Joseph Wong)

    Illegal Immigration

    | February 21, 2012 | 8:00 am

    I agree with Posner that illegal immigrants are generally productive members of the labor force, and make relatively little use of taxpayer-funded programs, such as Medicaid and other welfare programs. On the other hand, they pay little in taxes since they are frequently paid in cash and often do not pay either social security taxes or income taxes. In effect, they largely receive as take home pay what they add to the output of the country.

    It is also abundantly clear that, despite the rhetoric in the Republican campaign debates, the US will never try to ship 11 million illegal immigrants back to Mexico or the other countries they came from. Some form of de facto amnesty may be inevitable for the vast majority of these immigrants. Still, I find it difficult to simply accept wholesale violation of US immigration laws, especially since, as Posner indicates, illegal immigration will pick up again as the American economy continues to recover from the Great Recession. Further immigration from Mexico is surely to be expected as long as typical young Mexican workers can increase their earnings several fold by migrating illegally to the United States.

    Beyond amnesty, what can be done to discourage further illegal immigration to America, and reduce the number of illegal immigrants who are already here?  Perhaps extending the wall on the Mexican-US border would help a lot, although I anticipate that would-be illegal immigrants and their “mules” would create additional crossing points into the United States where there is no wall.

    A more promising approach is to tighten the enforcement of laws against employers who hire illegal immigrants.

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    Is Capitalism in Crisis?

    | February 13, 2012 | 7:45 am

    Capitalism in Crisis is the title of a long series of articles in the Financial Times by many participants. No doubt, the severity of the Great Recession has temporarily weakened the respect for capitalism, for “free” markets, and among other things, for the Chicago school of economics. Yet I will argue that the FT’s title should have had a question mark, as in: Is capitalism in crisis? My answer is that while certain aspects of the economic organization of capitalist countries like the United States should be changed to reduce the chances of future severe recessions, it remains true that economies which are competitive and capitalistic have the best prospects for sizable long-run economic growth.

    The Great Recession reinforced the lesson of prior panics and financial crises, lessons forgotten during the Great Moderation from about mid 1980s to 2006, that the financial sector has a fundamental built-in instability. In the past this was mainly associated with “runs” on banks, as during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. The instability of modern financial institutions is no longer much related to bank runs because of deposit insurance; rather it is mainly the result of the incentive for financial institutions to raise their profits by increasing their assets relative to their capital.

    One straightforward way to reduce this instability is to raise capital requirements of banks and other financial institutions. Greater capital would provide banks with bigger cushions if the value of their assets fell as a result of a crisis in asset markets. Any mandated capital/asset ratio should be greater for banks that are considered too big to fail than for other banks in order to make it less likely that larger banks would need a bailout. The United States and Europe have already moved to increase capital requirements for banks. These rules will have to be adapted over time as banks discover ways to mitigate the impact on their lending.

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    Suicide and its Assistance

    | February 05, 2012 | 1:21 pm

    Let me state at the outset that I believe a free society should allow the right to end one’s life through suicide. A suicide decision is not made lightly since the great majority of people cling to life even under the most dreadful circumstances. Only people who feel quite hopeless about their future seriously contemplate suicide.

    Rational forward–looking persons with good information about their future circumstances would commit suicide only when convinced that they would be worse off by continuing to live. David Hume said (in his Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul) “That suicide may often be consistent with interest and with our duty to ourselves no one can question, who allows that age, sickness, or misfortune may render life a burden, and make it worse than annihilation.” Schopenhauer was also confident about the rationality of suicide, “It will generally be found that, as soon as the terrors of life outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to his life” (Parerga and Paralipomena).

    Although I support the right to suicide, ideally it is best to have a cooling off period to make sure that a suicide is not attempted in a moment of great agitation that will pass before long. For example, a teenage boy may hang himself because he is bluntly rejected by his girl friend. If his hanging were prevented, he would likely have realized in a few months that he will be attracted to other girls as much or more than to the one who rejected him. He would be ashamed that he was so upset by her rejection.

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    Wealth and Income Taxes on the Rich

    | January 30, 2012 | 12:58 pm

    We are resuming our weekly entries. Sorry for any inconvenience we caused.

    The Occupy Wall Street movement has not expressed clear goals, but it does want higher taxes on the “rich”. President Obama agreed in his State of the Union address, and proposed that the rich-in his case, anyone with an annual income of at least $1 million- pay no less than 30% of their income in federal taxes. Others have proposed to add annual taxes on household wealth, in addition to taxes on income. The fact is that Obama’s tax goal is already being met by the complicated American tax code, while even a small wealth tax would discourage savings and create other problems.

    According to a 2010 study by the Congressional Budget Office, the effective federal tax rate on the top 1 percent of households has already been about 30%. This might seem to be a misprint since very wealthy persons like Warren Buffet and Mitt Romney report that they pay only about 15% of their income in taxes. However, much of their incomes come from investments that are first taxed at the corporate tax rate of 35%, and then the after-corporate tax income is taxed again when paid out as corporate dividends, or when capital gains are realized.

    According to the same CBO study, federal taxes on the middle classes comprise on average only about 15% of their incomes, This disparity in tax rates indicates that the American tax system is already quite progressive when corporate income taxes are combined with personal income and capital gains taxes. To be sure, it is inefficient to have such high tax rates on corporate incomes. Eliminating the corporate income tax, and then taxing personal incomes, capital gains, and dividends at the same rate would go a long way to both simplifying the tax code and to improving its efficiency.

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    Does American Imprison Too Many People?

    | December 05, 2011 | 8:02 am

    My discussion of this important subject will elaborate answers to the following questions:

    1. Does imprisonment reduce crime? Yes.
    2. Do many crimes cause considerable harm and hardships to victims? Yes.
    3. Does America imprison too many people?  In light of my answers to 1) and 2) you might expect my answer to this question to be “no”, but it is a strong “yes”.

    Imprisonment reduces crimes against the general public if only because of the incapacitation effect; that is, person in prison cannot commit crimes against the public-they can and do commit many crimes against other prisoners. For certain crimes, imprisonment also has a deterrent effect, so that potential offenders are deterred from committing crimes by the prospects of prison terms, especially when the probability of apprehension is not negligible.

    This conclusion does not deny that imprisonment raises the likelihood that some prisoners will commit crimes when they are released because their skills at legal employment eroded while in prisons, or they learned in prison how to be better criminals, or they become blacklisted for certain jobs, or for other reasons. Nevertheless, Levitt’s study cited by Posner and other studies find that on balance imprisonment reduces crime. The main disagreement is over whether the whole effect of imprisonment on crimes comes from the incapacitation effect, or whether some is also due to deterrence. I believe deterrence is also at work.

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    The Euro Crisis and Euro Bonds

    | November 28, 2011 | 8:01 am

    After the financial crisis erupted in 2008, continental Europe on the whole appeared to be in better shape than the US. The main reason was that the big EU banks held smaller amounts of questionable mortgage-backed securities than did American (and British) banks. The housing markets in Germany, France, Italy, and most other member countries-Spain and Ireland are two exceptions- had not boomed as much as the American and British markets.

    Unfortunately, the apparent more solid position of EU banks has turned out to be an illusion because these banks held large amounts of euro-denominated sovereign debt of Greece, Portugal, Italy, and other economically weak members of the EU. The presumption of EU banks in holding so much sovereign debt of weak members was that the strong members would not allow defaults on any sovereign debts issued in Euros. This same presumption led the now bankrupt American fund, MF Global Holdings, to bet billions of dollars on the expectation that sovereign debt of all members of the euro-zone would be paid off in full.

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    The Occupy Wall Street Movement

    | November 21, 2011 | 8:01 am

    Will the “Occupy” movement develop into a significant political force? I am doubtful: the movement is already losing supporters in most places where it has been active. Cold weather will accelerate the decline. The movement is losing ground not because the issues it raises are unimportant, but rather because the great majority of Americans and those in other countries with Occupy groups do not sympathize with most of the people doing the occupying.

    We discussed the unemployment situation in the US last week, and reform of banks in several previous posts, so I concentrate my comments on the inequality issues raised by occupiers. American inequality in the distribution of incomes, and inequality in many other Western nations, has grown a lot since the late 1970s. This growth can be separated into the growth in earnings inequality across education and other skill classes, and the growth in income at the very top of the income distribution. I start with the inequality by skill since that is what most closely affects the vast majority of people.

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    Has Structural Unemployment Become Important in the United States?

    | November 14, 2011 | 8:01 am

    The persistently high unemployment rate in the United States during the Great Recession has led to claims that much of American unemployment is “structural”. According to this view, the demand for workers by companies is insufficient to employ all unemployed workers because there is a mismatch between the skills possessed by many American workers and the skills required by companies. The structural advocates believe the skills demanded by companies tend to exceed or otherwise be different from the skills possessed by many unemployed workers. As a result, so goes the argument, these unemployed workers cannot find jobs and remain unemployed for a long time.

    Although I will argue that not much of American unemployment is “structural” or due to such a mismatch, the structural theory is on the surface supported by the large number of long-term unemployed, the most disturbing feature of American unemployment during the Great Recession. Structural advocates claim that unemployed individuals with skills that are only weakly demanded face prospects of remaining unemployed for a long time. Since the unemployment rate rose above 9% in 2009, the fraction of the unemployed who have been out of work for over 6 months has grown to over 40%. Prior to the start of the recession in 2008, long-term unemployed were a little under 20% of total unemployment. Although long-term unemployment usually rises during prolonged recessions, the magnitude of the rise during the current recession is unusual for the United States.

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    Greece and the Euro

    | November 07, 2011 | 7:56 am

    I will discuss the following two crucial questions about Greece and the euro:

    Should Greece have become part of the euro? No.

    Should Greece leave the euro? Not now, but probably in the future.

    Greece initially gained many apparent advantages from becoming part of the euro zone. The Greek government could borrow on the international capital market at interest rates that were only a little above the rates paid by Germany, the strongest EU economy. These low rates probably reflected a belief among investors that the strong members of the EU would support investors in the weaker economies if these economies ran into financial difficulties. Being part of the euro zone also led to easier access of Greek goods and services to the markets of other euro members, especially France and Germany. As a result, Greek GDP grew at good rates until the financial crisis hit.

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    Free the Captives

    | October 13, 2011 | 12:48 pm

    When government officials become the servants of the companies they regulate rather than the masters, they are “captured.” Political economists who describe this process point out that when regulators are captured, much of what they do is motivated, consciously or not, by a desire to help the industry they are regulating, even when the social goals they should pursue are very different. A famous illustration of capture is the way airlines were regulated under the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) from 1940 to 1978. Large airlines of the time, such as American and Delta, naturally had a strong incentive to try to keep new airlines out of the industry. As a compliant ally of the airline industry, the CAB did not approve one new interstate airline during this almost forty-year period. Only after President Carter abolished the CAB did many new airlines enter the industry; some of the old standbys, such as Pan Am and Eastern, ceased operations because they could not adjust to a competitive environment.

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    (photo credit: boris drenec)

    Government Workers and Fiscal Problems

    | September 26, 2011 | 12:01 pm

    Posner’s results are consistent with findings of little connection among the richer countries between their per capita incomes and the share of incomes spent by the government. Unfortunately, causation is hard to determine from such regressions. For example, as Scandinavian countries got richer, they raised government employment, partly by taking over much of the child-care services traditionally supplied by families. This helps explain why women in Scandinavia are much more likely than men to work for the government. A further problem with using government employment as a measure of government’s impact on an economy is that many regulatory agencies, such as the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), the Fed and other central banks, and labor departments often have large effects on an economy through regulations that require few employees.

    Public employees in Greece, Italy, in state and local governments of the United States, and government workers elsewhere are in the news in recent months not so much because of links to productivity, but rather because of connections to fiscal difficulties. Private companies typically adjust to financial problems partly by reducing employment and earnings of their employees, although such adjustments are harder in countries with strong unions and stringent labor protection legislation.

    Both employment and wage adjustments are much harder for governments in difficult fiscal situations. Many of their employees are protected from being laid off by union contracts and civil service rights. It is also usually extremely difficult to cut their earnings, again partly due to restrictions imposed by unions and government rules. Government workers also take many of their benefits in the form of early retirements, and generous health benefits and incomes after retirement. These inflate current government spending when many past employees are receiving retirement benefits. In addition, as Posner indicates, votes of government employees can influence election outcomes if they are aroused by what they perceive to be unfair treatment from an incumbent political party.

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    Market Failure Compared to Government Failure

    | September 18, 2011 | 5:40 pm

    When an industry in the private sector is not performing efficiently or effectively, there is said to be “market failure”. The recommendation by economists and others typically is then for government actions to combat such failure, such as taxes to help reduce pollution. The diagnosis of market failure may be accurate, but the call for government involvement may be naïve and inappropriate.

    The reason is that actual governments do not necessarily do what economists and others want them to do because there is “government failure” as well as market failure. Before recommending government actions to correct market failures, one should consider whether actual government policies would worsen rather than improve private sector outcomes. Since many factors often make for considerable government failure, considering such failure is crucial and not just a theoretical fine point.

    Consider, for example, that consumers are sometimes ignorant of the qualities and other aspects of the products they buy. However, before advocating various forms of government protection of consumers, we should recognize that voters are far more ignorant of political candidates then consumers are of what they buy. The reason is that consumers directly suffer if they make bad choices out of ignorance, while individual voters have negligible influence over political outcomes. Hence voters have little incentive to be informed about different candidates and their positions, and the consequences of the mistakes they make are largely borne by others.

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    A Second Stimulus Package?

    | September 12, 2011 | 8:07 am

    The recovery from the Great Recession has been slow and unsteady. Two years after unemployment peaked at 10.1%, it still remains over 9%, in contrast to the under 5% in 2007. GDP has grown very slowly during the past year, and is now more than 10% below its potential level. President Obama is rightly concerned about the large number of Americans who are unemployed, especially the longer term unemployed-those who have been without jobs for over six months. How successful will his proposed American Jobs Act be in getting the economy moving forward at a much faster clip?

    Boiled down to its essentials, the proposed Jobs Act is a second stimulus package since most of the spending is supposed to take place soon (before the end of 2012), while it will be financed over the next ten years in ways that are unclear.  At an estimated approximately $450 billion, this package is much smaller than the first stimulus package in 2009 that cost about $800 billion. The proposed structure is better than the first one since it relies more on tax cuts and direct subsidies to households: about 2/3 of the proposed spending comes from a temporary cut in (payroll) taxes and increases in benefits to the long term unemployed.

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    (photo credit: Thomas Hawk)

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