Risks and Rewards: Gary Becker's Contributions to Economics
回顾了加里·贝克尔将经济分析拓展至传统边界之外的社会问题，其原创性工作催生了多个经济学子领域，并通过引用数据证明其巨大影响力。
Gary Becker is one of the most original and influential economists of our age. His originality lies in extending the frontiers of economics and broadening the range of important social science problems that are amenable to economic analysis. He has gone against the grain of establishment thinking in the economics profession, invariably choosing to work on problems that were considered beyond the boundaries of modem economics. Yet this work made close contact with many of the great economists of the past, and many of the concepts he invented and developed are now widely, if not routinely used in modem economics. Several of the approaches to problems he pioneered have evolved into fields and specialities in their own right. That Becker has had an immense intellectual impact and influence in the economics profession is supported empirically by the voluminous citations to his work over the years, and in other ways. Obviously, citation counts have well-known difficulties and cannot prove anything by themselves. But if used in conjunction with more fundamental evidence, they do have the virtue of being quantifiable. Marshall Medoff's (1989)1 recent citation study is one of the best available because citations are weighted by the importance of the journals in which articles appear. Among non-Nobel prize economists working in U.S. universities under 65 years of age, Becker ranks first in total citations over the 1971-85 period to which Medoff's study refers, and he is first by a very wide margin. Though the study is limited to economists in the United States, it is clear that Becker would rank at or very close to the top of any worldwide list. Furthermore, Becker's work is virtually all substantive economic analysis. Hardly any of it is devoted to the development of methodological tools or to surveys, both of which gamer citations more easily, and many concepts