capitalism

30 Bentham, Jeremy (1748–1832)
earn the income necessary to live independently. For those
couples that remain married, earnings can have a significant
effect on the number of children they have and how much
they invest in their offspring’s education. In general, as
wages rise, Becker argued, families will tend to have fewer
children and to invest more in each child’s human capital.
This theory has been borne out by the experience of the
United States, Western Europe, and Japan, where fertility
has generally fallen as wage rates and per capita incomes
have risen.
Becker, like most members of the Chicago School,
regards economics as a value-free, positive science. As
such, his views on public policy issues are generally determined
by empirical results. Still, on most matters, Becker is
strongly supportive of the free market and skeptical of government
intervention.
From 1985 to 2004, Becker wrote a monthly column
for BusinessWeek magazine, the final article of which was
titled “A 19-Year Dialogue on the Power of Incentives.” He
noted there:
Along with many others of my generation, I was a socialist
when I started my university studies. But my first few
economics courses taught me the power of competition,
markets, and incentives, and I quickly became a classical
liberal. That means someone who believes in the power of
individual responsibility, a market economy, and a crucial
but limited role of government.
Many of those columns are collected in the 1996 volume,
The Economics of Life, coauthored with his wife,
Guity Nashat Becker. Since December 2004, Becker and
Richard Posner—a member of the faculty at the University
of Chicago Law School, a federal circuit court judge, and a
founder of the law-and-economics movement—have maintained
a blog, where they each publish a short weekly essay
on a timely policy issue.
Those heavily influenced by Becker include Steven
Levitt, professor of economics at Chicago and coauthor of
the best-selling book, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist
Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. According to
Levitt, “the science of economics is primarily a set of tools,
as opposed to a subject matter,” which means that “no subject...need
be beyond its reach.” Levitt, appropriately, is
director of the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory.
Becker is arguably the most ambitious and creative
economist of his generation. Although not as famous as his
mentor, Milton Friedman, Becker’s influence may ultimately
rival Friedman’s. As the late George Stigler noted,
“Gary Becker may well go down in history as the chief
architect of a truly general science of society.”
See also Economics, Chicago School of; Family; Friedman, Milton;
Posner, Richard; Racism
AS
Further Readings
Becker, Gary S. The Economic Approach to Human Behavior.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
———. The Economics of Discrimination. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1957.
———. Human Capital. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964.
———. A Treatise on the Family. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981.
Becker, Gary S., and Guity Nashat Becker. The Economics of Life.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996.
Febrero, Ramón, and Pedro S. Schwartz, eds. The Essence of
Becker. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 1995.
BENTHAM, JEREMY (1748–1832)
Jeremy Bentham is known today chiefly as the father of
utilitarianism. During his lifetime, Bentham was famous as
the proponent of a scientific approach to social reform.
Born in London, the son of an attorney, Bentham was a
precocious child. He studied at Westminster school and
Queen’s College in Oxford, England. In 1763, he began the
study of law at Lincoln’s Inn, but spent much time carrying
out chemical experiments in his chambers. In December of
that year, he attended the Oxford lectures of England’s most
famous lawyer, Sir William Blackstone, author of the
celebrated Commentaries on the Laws of England. He
remarked later that he had immediately detected the fallacies
in Blackstone’s arguments. In 1776, he fiercely attacked
the Commentaries for being hostile to reform in his first
published book, Fragment on Government. In A Defence of
Usury (1787), he argued that it was a mistake for governments
to prohibit high interest rates because individuals
are the best judges of what will benefit them. His major
work, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation, was published in 1789. Other significant publications
include A Catechism of Parliamentary Reform
(1817, written in 1809), The Rationale of Reward (1825),
The Rationale of Punishment (1830), the Book of Fallacies
(1824), and the Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827).
Several of Bentham’s writings were first published in
French, and he was made an honorary citizen of France,
with which he had close ties.
In Bentham’s time, law, judicial procedures, and life in
general were governed, to a much greater degree than in our
own, by historical precedent and beliefs not subjected to
critical examination. We owe much of the difference
between his time and ours to Bentham. Bentham was a man
of the Age of Reason; his models were such figures as John
Locke (especially Locke’s Essay Concerning Human
Understanding), Claude Adrien Helvetius, and Voltaire,
and his principal goal was to replace the traditional reliance
on custom with rational analysis. Bentham argued that a
policy or procedure was in accordance with reason when it