Gary S. Becker was University Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Chicago. In 1992, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.

• Part I: Personal Capital *1. Preferences and Values *De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum * A Theory of Rational Addiction * Rational Addiction and the Effect of Price on Consumption * An Empirical Analysis of Cigarette Addiction * Habits, Addictions, and Traditions Part 2: Social Capital * The Economic Way of Looking at Life * A Theory of Social Interactions * A Note on Restaurant Pricing and Other Examples of Social Influences on Price * A Simple Theory of Advertising as a Good or Bad * Norms and the Formation of Preferences * Spouses and Beggars: Love and Sympathy * Acknowledgments * References * Index

[Becker’s] achievement has been to create an elegant structure, internally consistent and based on reasonable assumptions, and to use it to generate many testable propositions about how people grapple with the complexities of personal choice… [He] has helped to liberate economics from a straitjacket of oversimplification and narrowness of view.