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Gary Becker
Nobel Prize in Economics
Gary Becker: Early on, maybe my second or third year, I got a little idea that I thought I could use to understand this social problem of discrimination against groups. In particular blacks, but also women and other groups -- Jews, Chinese in many societies, and so on. So I had this little idea, how I could use economic theory to talk about the connection between people's prejudices and how that worked out in the economic system. So let's say if an employer was prejudiced against black workers, what did that mean for the jobs that black workers could get and for the earnings that they would make compared to, say whites, who were equally skilled? Now it's not so obvious that even though, let's say employers will be prejudiced, how that shows up in terms of earnings and occupation. That linkage had not been discussed, in fact you'll find almost no literature on discrimination, prior to my book, by economists. So I had this little idea. I saw a way of taking the prejudices of workers and employers and customers and all groups, even governments, and sort of putting that through an economic analysis with competition and the goals of employers, opportunities for black and white employees to choose among different firms. So it becomes a complicated problem, using all the tools of economics. I saw a way to do that and be able to say, "Well, if there's much prejudice under this-this conditions, there'll be this much difference in wages between equally productive whites and blacks, this much unemployment of blacks, this much lower occupations of blacks." So that really excited me, because it seemed to be obviously important if we were trying to understand the situation of blacks, you just can't look at we can't see the prejudices, it's manifested in what we see in terms of earnings and employment. I had something that could be manifested and yet I had a way of working back and sort of inferring what the prejudices must have been. So I thought that was really exciting.
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