We love profiling Nobel laureates, but we haven't gotten to Gary Becker yet. The winner for Economics in 1992, he was called "the greatest social scientist who has lived" by Milton Friedman... who knew a thing or two about that.

In his long career, Becker studied the economic aspects of discrimination, as well as crime and punishment. He came up with the concept of human capital. He was one of the first to apply economics to the household and proved the importance of women in the workplace. (We would say "duh!", but clearly some people still need convincing.)

That is all fantastic, but not the reason we're profiling Becker today. That comes from another quote, but this one is not from Friedman. It's from Becker's daughter... and the suggestion box of this very website. She writes to as, asking to profile her father, "most of all because my snobby stepmother couldn't stand that he was a Jew from Brooklyn and tried to pretend he was a goy."

Take that, evil stepmother!