Maggs Bros.

The first separate appearance of the article that launched Gary Becker’s brilliant academic career and announced his arrival as one of the most important social scientists of the second half of the twentieth century, being the published version of Becker’s senior thesis written while he was still only a Princeton undergraduate.

‘Gary Becker is one of the most original minds in modern economics and his writing shave the unique quality of opening up new horizons in economic analysis by relating widely observed but apparently unconnected phenomena to the operation of some single, general principle’ (Blaug). He was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economics for ‘having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including nonmarket behaviour.’