This paper presents Gary Becker's approach to conducting creative, empirically fruitful economic research. It describes the traits and methodology that made him such a productive and influential scholar.

This paper presents Gary Becker's approach to conducting creative, empirically fruitful economic research. It describes the traits and methodology that made him such a productive and influential scholar

This chapter examines John Tomer’s contributions to our understanding of the concept of human capital. Tomer criticized the standard mainstream view of the concept as narrowly focused on education and training and as seeing investments in human capital as having “an individual, cognitive,...

In 1958 Jacob Mincer pioneered an important approach to understand earnings distribution. In the years since Mincer?s seminal work, he as well as his students and colleagues extended the original human capital model, reaching important conclusions about a whole array of observations pertaining...

This essay analyzes the inconsistencies in Milton Friedman's proposal for a market-based public education system through school vouchers. The author argues that voucher policy has been executed inefficiently and has become a political tool for the religious right, tied to issues of race, class,...

Liberty is both dependent upon and limited by the State. The State protects individuals from the coercion of others, but paradoxically, it must exercise coercion itself in doing so. Unfortunately, the reliance on the State to deter coercion raises the possibility that the State's powers of...