An economist from the University of Chicago, Kevin Murphy, has been named a fellow by the MacArthur Foundation. From the Wall Street Journal ($$$ req'd):
He is cut from the mold of Nobel Prize-winner Gary Becker, another Chicago researcher, who took economics beyond its traditional areas to show how the field could be used to explain social issues like drug addiction and family life.
Mr. Murphy's latest research assigns a dollar value to increasing life expectancies. Economists try to put hard numbers to the value people place on life itself by measuring the trade-offs individuals make when it comes to life-threatening activities like smoking, driving without a seat belt or choosing risky occupations.
Mr. Murphy and his co-author, Robert Topel, calculate that just a 1% reduction in deaths from cancer would have an economic value of about $500 billion to the U.S. They say reduced mortality from heart disease since 1970 has been worth $1.5 trillion a year to the U.S. -- about equal to the annual economic output of France.
Mr. Murphy became prominent in economics in the 1990s for studies that showed the role education played in rising wage inequality. Advancements in technology had placed a premium on the skills of educated workers, he found, driving up their wages compared with less-educated workers. In 1997, the American Economic Association awarded him the John Bates Clark medal, given every two years to the nation's top economist under the age of 40.
Congratulations to professor Murphy. I am a firm believer that students of sociology, social work, and other social science disciplines (including econ) should be familiar with the work of Gary Becker and others like Murphy and Steven Levitt. Some of the most interesting stuff (in my humble opinion) that has been done in economics over the past 30 has come from the tree rooted by Becker. Here's a press release from the University of Chicago on the two professors from this institution who received genius grants.