Alfred Marshall and Adam Smith were two economists who had a big influence on your work. I like about Smith and still do, he was clearly the greatest economist who ever lived. He took a broad approach to economics but thought techniques of the analysis that we applied in one area could be applied over wide range of behavior. So he built a lot of tools to make economics an engine of analysis for analyzing actual problems.
Russ Roberts interviews Gary Becker, of the University of Chicago, on the challenges of being an intellectual maverick, the economic approach to human behavior, the influences of Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall on Becker's work and Becker's optimism for the future of economics.