Straight Outta Princeton: Toward a Theory of Gary Becker
通过研究加里·贝克尔早期职业生涯，结合档案证据与科学史方法，揭示其将普林斯顿的理性行为假设与芝加哥的知识文化结合，利用价格理论和低成本数据系统产生新颖成果的过程，对理解经济学史和科学史有价值。
Abstract This article makes an argument about mid-twentieth-century economic knowledge by studying the early career of Gary Becker. Where existing accounts rely on textual, individualist, or ideological theories, the article places archival evidence in dialogue with approaches from the history of science to suggest that Becker's approach is better explained by accounting for the mundane elements necessary for a career in mid-century economics. It shows how Becker, a mathematically inclined student, hybridized assumptions of rational behavior from his undergraduate training at Princeton with an energized culture of knowledge at Chicago. He there combined the low-tech tool of price theory to low-cost data, doing so in a manner that systematically produced novelty while transcending domain specificity. The argument therefore proposes a new way to understand Becker's work while also suggesting that the history of economics offers considerable promise for future historians of science.