Daily Inspiration Quote by Gary Becker

Becker is side-eyeing the cozy habit of mistaking a hunch for an explanation. The line concedes something important: intuition about human behavior isn’t useless. It’s the raw material. But he immediately demotes it to “only the starting point,” a phrasing that matters because it reframes common sense as pre-scientific draft work - the sketch before the model.

The subtext is a polemic against two targets at once. One is armchair psychologizing: stories that feel right because they flatter our sense of insight, yet stop short of producing testable, non-obvious consequences. The other is a kind of economic formalism that treats “rationality” as a smug axiom rather than a disciplined method. Becker’s move is to insist that systematic analysis earns its keep by generating “interesting implications” - predictions that bite, trade-offs that surprise, comparative statics that can be checked against data. If your assumption can’t cash out into constraints and consequences, it’s not analysis; it’s vibe.

Contextually, this sits inside Becker’s broader project: expanding economics beyond markets into crime, family life, discrimination, addiction - domains where people are especially tempted to reach for moralizing or folk wisdom. His intent is to justify that expansion without pretending humans are robots. Start with intuition, yes, but don’t stop where the comfort begins. The “still” at the front signals a debate already in progress: he’s answering critics who think economic models are thin. His reply is that thin starting assumptions can be powerful if the machinery that follows forces clarity, generates falsifiable implications, and, ideally, makes you revise the intuition you began with.