Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts,

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org, or you can subscribe,

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Today is May 21, 2014, and my guest is Edward Lezier, the Jack Steel Parker Professor

of Human Resources Management and Economics at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University,

and the Morris Arnold and Nanodgene Cox Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.

Eddie, welcome to econtalk. Well, thank you, it's a pleasure to be with you. Our topic for today is

the work of Gary Becker, who recently passed away, and I want to start with some brief personal

thoughts from both of us, and then we'll move on to Gary's work. Eddie, tell us how you knew Gary,

and when you first met him and your relationship with him over the years. Well, Gary was my idol,

actually, as both an undergraduate and as a graduate student. When I say that, it's actually

quite startling because Gary was not an old man at the time. In fact, he was just in his 30s,

but was such a powerful intellect and such a powerful force on the economics profession that he

already had a major impact, not only on his graduate students, but also on undergraduates

at other institutions and people following economics in general. He was a major force. I was a

student at undergraduate at UCLA, and I was a PhD student at Harvard. I didn't have any direct

contact with Gary, but it was always my dream as a Harvard PhD student to get a job at the

University of Chicago and to work with Gary Becker. That happened. That was my first job, and that's

how I got to know him. What was your dissertation on? And who'd you work with at Harvard?

Well, I actually wrote a dissertation on a combination of human capital, which is a labor

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