The Becker-Posner Blog

The Becker-Posner Blog

The Becker-Posner Blog explores current issues in economics, law and policy.

Author: Co-author Gary Becker is an economics and sociology professor at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business who won the John Bates Clark Medal in 1967, the Nobel Prize in economics in 1992, the National Medal of Science in 2000 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007. He has authored seven books on the subject of economics, and he has also co-authored Social Economics: Market Behavior in a Social Environment with a fellow University of Chicago professor Kevin Murphy and co-authored The Economics of Life with his wife, Guity Nashat Becker. Blawg co-author Richard Posner is a judge on the Chicago-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. He teaches part time at the University of Chicago Law School and has written 30 books, most recently A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression, How Judges Think, The Little Book of Plagiarism and Economic Analysis of Law. He also authors A Failure of Capitalism.

Blawg Related Categories: Judiciary • Legal Theory • University of Chicago • Judge • Economics

Recent Posts from The Becker-Posner Blog


  • Will We Go the Way of Japan?--Posner

    Japan spent the 1990s unsuccessfully trying to recover from a collapse of the Japanese banking industry caused by the bursting of a housing bubble, despite aggressive monetary and fiscal policies. As a result of those…

  • Will We Go the Way of Japan? No, Unless US Government Policies Discourage Growth-Becker

    Japan has had a very slow rate of growth in its GDP since 1991, averaging just a little over 1 percent. Given this slow growth, and the government's continued failed efforts to prop up their…

  • Productivity and Jobs-Becker

    Last week two pieces of news about the American economy were disclosed, with important implications for where the economy is going. On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that during the third quarter of 2009, productivity…

  • Productivity and Unemployment--Posner

    Becker is certainly right that growth in productivity is an important driver of economic growth. But we must consider the source of the growth in productivity in order to understand the conjunction in the last…

  • Fiscal Imprudence, Distributive Injustice: the $250 per Social Security Annuitant Plan--Posner

    In October, the President announced that $13 billion (some commentators believe a more accurate estimate is $14 billion) of the $787 billion stimulus package enacted this past February would be used to pay every social…

  • Fiscal Imprudence and Fiscal Stimulus-Becker

    The government's preliminary estimate of the growth in American GDP during the third quarter of 2009 is an impressive annual rate of 3.5%. This figure may be revised downward (or upward) as more data on…

  • Notice

    Longtime readers of this blog will be pleased to learn that this month sees its migration into book form. Uncommon Sense: Economic Insights, from Marriage to Terrorism, which collects what we believe are the best,…

  • Pay Controls Once Again-Becker

    I sympathize with all the people who are upset by the very large bonuses, stock options, and other compensation received by heads of some financial institutions that ran their companies into the ground through bad…

  • Pay Caps for Financial Executives--Posner

    Limiting the compensation of a handful of employees at a handful of firms can't have any effect except to benefit the firms' competitors by making them more attractive places to work. The limitations are a…

  • The Economics of Organizations--Posner

    Oliver Williamson, an economist who won half a Nobel prize last week, has made important contributions to a field of economics that is not as well known as it should be: "organization economics." This is…