Straight Outta Princeton: Toward a Theory of Gary Becker

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.