Blair Sandler writes that:>>Gary Becker is not a person. He's a utility-maximizing organism. Two entirely unrelated species.<< Honestly (i.e., non-facetiously), Becker is an eccentric professor, one of many in academia and one of many types. As an eccentric prof. myself (of a very different sort than Becker), I think it's sort of nice that academia is willing to accept people like that. It's clearly preferable to the nuthouse. The problem is that capitalism picks up Becker's (and Becker-type) ideas and runs with them, using them to justify the system and even to suggest new policies. Even BUSINESS WEEK, which is one of the more enlightened of business periodicals in the US, gives Becker a column so that he can feed and thus reinforce their business readership's prejudices and ideology. Worse, Beckerian ideology attracts all sorts of funds from conservative (so-called "laissez-faire") billionaires: they use tax-free foundations and other tax breaks to funnel money to the Chicago school and its satellites, spawning all sorts of "Chicago clones" who spread the gospel to the unwashed masses. The Beckerian ideology -- which basically sees the whole human world as nothing but markets -- fits quite well with the capitalist mode of production's normal tendency to commodify everything, to create the universal market. The Chicago-school slogan "if the world doesn't fit the model, force it to do so" seems to have taken over public policy lately, led by the World Bank/IMF, Thatcher, Reagan, etc., etc. BTW, we should remember that Michael E. does not share the same political-economic assumptions as the vast majority of pen-l. He therefore does not understand our sense of humor, confusing light-hearted banter about Gary Becker with personal attacks on that man. in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ., 7900 Loyola Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90045-8410 USA 310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950 "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
