1 New York Post, 14 May 2013.
2 See Sandel, M. (2012), What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (London: Allen Lane) for most of these examples, as well as many other thought 1-provoking case studies of the expanding scope of markets.
3 Becker interview in K. Horn (2009), Roads to Wisdom (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar).
4 Tim Harford has written several columns praising Becker’s work (e.g. ‘Gary Becker – The Man Who Put a Price on Everything’, Financial Times, 6 May 2014), while John Kay (2003) notes drily that ‘no parody is required’ (The Truth about Markets (London: Penguin), 186).
5 Becker, G. (1991, enlarged edn), A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 124.
6 Ibid., 98.
7 Herfeld, Catherine (2012), ‘The Potentials and Limitations of Rational Choice Theory: An Interview with Gary Becker’, Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, 1, 73–86.
8 Becker, G. (1976), The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 5.
9 Ibid., 8.
10 Becker (1991), 339.
11 Interview with Gary Becker in Region, June 2002, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the-region/interview-with-gary-becker.
12 Friedman, M. (1953), Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 21.
13 Becker (1976), 5.
14 Robert Solow in R. Swedberg (ed.) (1990), Economics and Sociology (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 276.
15 Davies, W. (2014), The Limits of Neoliberalism (London: Sage), 86.
16 Becker, G. (1976), The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 10.
17 Blinder, A. (1974), ‘The Economics of Brushing Teeth’, Journal of Political Economy, 82 (4), 887–91. Becker told James Heckman about his support for the paper: see ‘Private notes on Gary Becker’ at https://bfi.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/file_uploads/Heckman-tribute-text.1.20.14.pdf.
18 Becker, G. (1993), ‘The Economic Way of Looking at Behavior’, Journal of Political Economy, 101 (3), 391.
19 Becker, (1976), 7–8.
20 Breit, W., and Hirsch, B. (eds.) (2009), Lives of the Laureates (Cambridge: MIT Press), 402.
21 Clark, K., ‘In Praise of Original Thought’, US News and World Report, 24 October 2005, 52.
22 Breit and Hirsch, 408.
23 Schelling, T. (1984), Choice and Consequence: Perspectives of an Errant Economist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 59.
24 Banzhaf, H. Spencer (2014), ‘The Cold-war Origins of the Value of Statistical Life’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 28 (4), 216.
25 Schelling, T. (1968), ‘The Life You Save May be Your Own’, in S. Chase (ed.), Problems in Public Expenditure Analysis (Washington: Brookings Institution), 128–9.
26 Becker, G., and Posner, R. (2009), Uncommon Sense (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 38.
27 Becker, Gary S., and Elias, J. (2007), ‘Introducing Incentives in the Market for Live and Cadaveric Organ Donations’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21 (3), 9.
28 For an excellent discussion of kidney markets see P. Roscoe (2014), I Spend Therefore I Am (London: Penguin).
29 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, founder of Organs Watch, quoted in D. Satz (2010), Why Some Things Should Not be for Sale (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 198.
30 Levitt, S., and Dubner, S. (2005), Freakonomics (London: Allen Lane), 10.
31 Schelling, 116.
32 The argument in this paragraph is heavily influenced by Debra Satz’s discussion of Schelling’s Titanic example. See Satz, 84–9.