Gary Becker

Gary Becker is the prophet of the optimizer. He won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economics for extending microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior, including nonmarket behavior—education, crime, the family, racial prejudice—and was widely called an imperialist for it. His central claim, stated with unusual precision in his Nobel lecture, was that the economic approach is “a method of analysis, not an assumption about particular motivations”: a lens that can be dropped over any behavior and asked the same question—what is this agent maximizing, under what constraints, and what does that predict? We have now built machines whose entire architecture is that question made literal. A reinforcement-learning agent is, almost to the letter, Becker’s rational maximizer made out of silicon and gradient descent—a thing that selects actions to push a number as high as it will go under the constraints of its environment and training. Where Becker’s human capital