What is what is a class on the economics of crime about?

yeah i mean every when people kind of come into the class they're like so we're going to talk about white collar crime and you know i i do a little bit but like um the economics of crime it really goes back to a very influential con a very influential economist named gary becker so gary becker he had this kind of way of taking things that economists thought they couldn't study And then he's like, no, no, no.

I can actually write down a model, and we can see that thing that you thought wasn't suitable for economic analysis is completely suitable for economists to go out there and study.

So he wrote this paper about punishment in the 1960s, where it was like an economic analysis of crime.

And in there, before he had come about, basically economists were like, look, committing a crime, it's an irrational thing.

You could go to prison.

No sane person should be out there committing crime.

So how did this come about?