From the NY Times obit:
Gary S. Becker, a Nobel prize-winning economics professor and longtime columnist for Business Week whose research illuminated motivations about such aspects of everyday life as marriage, crime, addiction, racial discrimination and birthrates, died on Saturday in Chicago. He was 83. ...
In his 1992 Nobel lecture, Professor Becker described how he employed economics to analyze social issues outside the discipline’s traditional range of vision.
He said that, unlike Marxists, he rejected the assumption that individuals were motivated solely by the prospect of selfish, material gain. Rather, he insisted, “behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences” that can also include altruism, loyalty and spite.
Actions are constrained by various factors, but the most fundamental is limited time, he argued. “So while goods and services have expanded enormously in rich countries,” he said, “the total time available to consume has not. Thus wants remain unsatisfied in rich countries as well as in poor ones.”
Becker's major contribution to environmental economics is in the area of nonmarket valuation. The value of travel time is an important contributor to the participation, site selection and intensity decisions in recreation demand. Phaneuf and Smith (2005) in their Handbook of Environmental Economics chapter, include citations to "A theory of the allocation of time" (1965) and "Habits, addictions and tradictions" (1992). The first time that I ecountered Becker (1965) was as a graduate student in a spepecial section in Water Resources Research "On Valuing Water-Based Recreation" in the introduction written by Brookshire and Smith (1987).
In his 1997 RFF working paper, Kerry Smith puts it this way:
Over thirty years ago Becker [1965] suggested a reconsideration of consumer choice that proposed we treat each individual as combining market goods and time to produce services (labeled "basic commodities"). These services, and not the goods or the time, contributed to utility. His proposal assumed household technologies were Leontief, so time was a perfect complement to private goods. Subsequent descriptions of the framework have relaxed several limiting assumptions used in that formulation, one of them allows time and goods to be substitutes in production. It is now generally acknowledged that these approaches offer convenient frameworks for describing the general logic of consumer decisions but do not add to the testable restrictions associated with conventional models.
Two non-market valuation methods are most easily developed using this structure -- the travel cost recreation demand model and the averting behavior framework. Below we consider the treatment of time in each, as well as how it has been used to convey the amount of a resource quality change in contingent valuation studies.
I met Professor Becker as a fourth year graduate student when he came to the University of Kentucky to give some sort of distinguished lecture. The faculty arranged for a few graduate students to meet with him and attempt to share our ideas and get any feedback. I described my dissertation for about 5 minutes. He spoke longer and managed to let me know he didn't totally agree with what I was doing without making me feel like an idiot. We all left the room thinking he was a great guy.
