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Week of 30 April 1999 Vol. II, No. 33 Feature Article Nobel prize-winning economist to deliver year's final Templeton Lecture By Eric McHenry If Glenn Loury embraced the views of every speaker he invited to the University, he'd be a man of more internal conflicts than Hamlet. As director of the John Templeton Lectures on Freedom, Markets, and Economic Justice, Loury seeks not only broad representation from within the social sciences and the humanities, but also a diversity of ideologies. The 1998-99 Templeton Lecture series, which has brought British political scientist and philosopher John Gray, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, and Boston community activist and spiritual leader Rev. Eugene Rivers to the University, will conclude with a lecture by Gary Becker, a Nobel prize-winning professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago. Gary Becker "I don't necessarily endorse the Beckerian worldview," says Loury, a UNI professor, CAS professor of economics, and director of BU's Institute on Race and Social Division (IRSD), "but I do admire and have indeed been deeply influenced by his work. And I thought it important to have a spectrum of ideological or political conviction represented. "I wouldn't want to label Gary Becker in any simple-minded way as being to the left or to the right," Loury says, "but he is a University of Chicago School stalwart. He's one of the fathers of a tradition of inquiry in economics that is a free-market, liberal, in the 19th-century sense of the word, tradition. He's not a political animal. He's a scholar. But I think it would be fair to say that he is in some ways perceived as right of center, just as Orlando Patterson is in some ways perceived as left of center." Becker, who won the Nobel prize in economics in 1992, is also exceptionally prominent in his field, known for bringing economic theory to bear on social issues that have traditionally been regarded as impervious to such analysis. Loury calls him "one of the 10 most influential economists of the second half of the 20th century. "Gary Becker is a relentless practitioner of the economic paradigm of rational choice and individual self-interest and markets," Loury says, "but a practitioner of that paradigm in the analysis of phenomena that have not historically been taken to be strictly economic phenomena. 'The Economics of Marriage' is the title of one of his influential articles. The Economics of Discrimination was his dissertation in the 1950s, and it has since become a classic. It's still very often cited as a foundational work in that area." Becker's most recent books carry similarly provocative titles: The Economics of Life (McGraw Hill, 1997) and Accounting for Tastes (Harvard University Press, 1996). Many traditional political and social theorists, Loury says, are "driven up the wall" by the application of economic methodology to what has generally been their exclusive purview. When scheduling the Templeton series, Loury doesn't deliberately look for controversy. Original thinking, however, is a criterion. Along with professional and ideological variety, he says, he is interested in speakers who have something unconventional to