Peabody Award
皮博迪奖,美国广播电视文化成就奖
The George Foster Peabody Awards (or simply Peabody Awards) program, named for American businessman and philanthropist George Peabody, recognizes distinguished and meritorious public service by American radio and television stations, networks, online media, producing organizations, and individuals.
Economics empiricism
经济学帝国主义
Economics empiricism (sometimes economic imperialism) in contemporary economics refers to economic analysis of seemingly non-economic aspects of life, such as crime, law, the family, prejudice, tastes, irrational behavior, politics, sociology, culture, religion, war, science, and research.
Gary Becker
一位芝加哥学派的经济学家,20世纪70年代,出版了《人类行为的经济分析》一书,尝试用微观经济学的基本方法和概念——如理性选择、利益最大化行为、交换等等——来解释一些非经济问题(如犯罪、家庭、教育等),并取得了出于意料的好效果。这种成功不仅表明许多传统意义上的“非经济学”研究领域被纳入经济学研究范畴的可能性,而且在更高的层次上也意味着经济学家向原来的学科分工发起了挑战。也是在这个意义上,贝克尔的这本著作被视为“经济学帝国主义”的最强音,是经济学家“入侵”其他社会科学领域的号角。
Gary Stanley Becker (December 2, 1930 – May 3, 2014) was an American economist. He was a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago. Described as “the most important social scientist in the past 50 years” by the New York Times, Becker was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992 and received the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007. A 2011 survey of economics professors named Becker their favorite living economist over the age of 60, followed by Ken Arrow and Robert Solow.
Becker was one of the first economists to branch into what were traditionally considered topics belonging to sociology, including racial discrimination, crime, family organization, and drug addiction (see rational addiction). He was known for arguing that many different types of human behavior can be seen as rational and utility maximizing. His approach included altruistic behavior of human behavior by defining individuals' utility appropriately. He was also among the foremost exponents of the study of human capital. Becker was also credited with the "rotten kid theorem."
Becker's insight was to recognize that deadweight losses put a brake on predation. He took the well-known insight that deadweight losses are proportional to the square of the tax, and used it to argue that a linear increase in takings by a predatory interest group will provoke a non-linear increase in the deadweight losses its victim suffers. These rapidly increasing losses will prod victims to invest equivalent sums in resisting attempts on their wealth. The advance of predators, fueled by linear incentives slows before the stiffening resistance of prey outraged by non-linear damages. These contributions to politics by Becker have come to be known as "Chicago political economy" of which Becker is considered one of the founding fathers.