The heart of the Beckerian approach is that people make decisions with purpose. His approach grants agency to everyone from the love-struck teen to the potential addict who is trying to decide whether to shoot up for the first time. In his telling, they’re considering the likely consequences of their actions, and so they’re responsive to incentives.

Image Gary Becker, left, receiving the Nobel Economics Prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in Stockholm in 1992. Mr. Becker died Saturday at 83. Credit... Jan Collsioo/European Pressphoto Agency

This is a controversial view, to be sure. To the Chicago School he was their next general, the intellectual heir to Milton Friedman and George Stigler. He shared their expansive view of economics and charged through disciplinary boundaries. He had the audacity to suggest that virtually every aspect of human behavior was amenable to economic analysis. And in his version of events, behaviors once considered “uneconomic” — the pathology of crime, or the romance of love — reflect the calculus of costs and benefits.

To his critics, the idea that such decisions reflected rational choice was, on its face, absurd. In their caricature, Professor Becker’s world was populated by a hyper-rational economic man, obsessed with maximizing his wealth. By this view, rational choice economics brings mathematical formalism, but little insight. This caricature is shallow, and misses the deeper point.

Professor Becker’s Nobel Lecture was his sharpest defense against these charges, and he recounted how he “tried to pry economists away from narrow assumptions about self-interest.” Instead, he said, “behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences.” Purposeful decision making doesn’t mean that behavior is driven by financial concerns, but rather, in his view, “individuals maximize welfare, as they conceive it, whether they be selfish, altruistic, loyal, spiteful or masochistic.”

While I suspect that he would deny the charge, he was in many respects the first behavioral economist, and in that same Nobel lecture, he argued that “actions are constrained by income, time, imperfect memory and calculating capacities, and other limited resources.”