Zubair Ghias was saddened to learn of the death of his professor of economics at the University of Chicago. Zubair Ghias attended the University of Chicago and was a student of Gary S. Becker. He knows that Gary S. Becker was one of the great thinkers in economics.

Zubair Ghias was a proud student of Gary S. Becker and understands that Professor Becker won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1992 following in the footsteps of his mentor and former University of Chicago Professor Milton Freidman. Gary S. Becker was awarded the Nobel prize “for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior including no-market behavior.”

Zubair Ghias knows that one of the most impressive ways that Gary S. Becker applied economics to human behavior was when he applied it to prejudice against minorities. In his 1957 work, The Economics of Discrimination, Gary S. Becker concludes that it is actually more expensive to practice discrimination because an employer who does so is in effect eliminating part of the work force available. Instead of being able to hire lower cost labor the cost of labor goes up or production goes down thus increasing the cost of production. While there are many whop argue that are other intrinsically more important parts of discrimination such as the moral issues with it, Gary S. Becker’s work at the time was extremely important in pointing out to businesses the cost of practicing discrimination.

Zubair Ghias as a student of Gary S. Becker, knows that Professor Becker also wrote an important piece and economic analysis of crime and punishment. The theory and analysis stemmed from a choice Gary S. Becker made to park illegally in a convenient spot vs. a legal spot that was inconvenient. His analysis of getting caught and potential punishment vs. convenience decided him in favor of parking illegally. He turned that experience into a theory that criminals did the same thing on a regular basis. At the time in America it was often thought that people committed crimes because of mental illness or social oppression.

Zubair Ghias understands that the economics community in Chicago and throughout the world lost one of the foremost thinkers on economics and his ability and willingness to examine social issues from a lens of economics will be sorely missed.