I wrote this short essay on Gary Becker for the Hoover Digest where it will appear in a forthcoming issue:
Gary Becker was “the greatest social scientist who has lived and worked in the last half century.” So declared Milton Friedman a decade ago, and when Gary Becker died earlier this month at the age of 83 the outpouring of praise from his friends and colleagues reminded us why: His unique style of economic analysis, firmly rooted in facts, yielded a host of truly amazing ideas and predictions from the growth effects of investment in human capital to recent changes in the distribution of income and intergenerational mobility. Many of his ideas—including that free competitive markets help combat discrimination and that simple cost-benefit calculations applied to children help determine fertility rates—were originally controversial, but are now widely accepted. I regularly teach them to beginning students in the Economics 1…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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