Gary Becker died over the weekend.  Ilya Somin has this post at Volokh Conspiracy and points us to this summary of Becker's work.  From the latter:

Gary S. Becker received the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics for "having extended the domain of economic theory to aspects of human behavior which had previously been dealt with--if at all--by other social science disciplines such as sociology, demography and criminology."

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Not even crime escaped Becker's keen analytical mind. In the late 1960s he wrote a trail-blazing article whose working assumption is that the decision to commit crime is a function of the costs and benefits of crime. From this assumption he concluded that the way to reduce crime is to raise the probability of punishment or to make the punishment more severe. His insights into crime, like his insights on discrimination and human capital, helped spawn a new branch of economics.

The latter point seems so obvious now, yet the people running around proclaiming themselves "smart on crime" today apparently don't get it.  The genuinely smart people do.