Books by Gary S. Becker

On December 5, 2004, the still-developing blogosphere took one of its biggest steps toward mainstream credibility, as Nobel Prize - winning economist Gary S Becker and renowned jurist and legal scholar Richard A Posner announced the formation of the Becker-Posner Blog. This book gathers the most important and innovative entries from the blog.

Becker argues that past experiences and social influences form two basic capital stocks, personal and social, and applies these concepts to assessing the effects of advertising, the power of peer pressure, the nature of addiction, and the function of habits.

The authors offer an analytic framework for measuring how people make choices, including social environment with standard goods and services in their utility functions. These functions enable analysis of how changes in social environment affect choice, and provide a way of analyzing how social environment is determined by individuals' interactions.

A study of how investment in an individual's education and training is similar to business investments in equipment. This edition has four new chapters, covering topics including: human capital, fertility and economic growth, the division of labour and economic considerations within the family.