A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

Social Causes of Psychological Distress

A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants since 1880.

Understanding social aspects of parental well-being is vital, because parents' welfare has implications not only for parents themselves but also for child development, fertility, and the overall health of a society. This article provides a critical review of scholarship on parenthood and well-being in advanced economies published from 2010 to 2019. It focuses on the role of social, economic, cultural, and institutional contexts of parenting in influencing adult well-being. We identify major themes, achievements, and challenges and organize the review around the demands-rewards perspective and two theoretical frameworks: the stress process model and life course perspectives. The analysis shows that rising economic insecurities and inequalities and a diffusion of intensive parenting ideology were major social contexts of parenting in the 2010s. Scholarship linking parenting contexts and parental well-being illuminated how stressors related to providing and caring for children could unjustly burden some parents, especially mothers, those with fewer socioeconomic resources, and those with marginalized statuses. In that vein, researchers continued to emphasize how stressors diverged by parents' socioeconomic status, gender, and partnership status, with new attention to strains experienced by racial/ethnic minority, immigrant, and LGBTQ parents. Scholars' comparisons of parents' positions in various countries expanded, enhancing knowledge regarding specific policy supports that allow parents to thrive. Articulating future research within a stress process model framework, we showed vibrant theoretical pathways, including conceptualizing potential parental social supports at multiple levels, attending to the intersection of multiple social locations of parents, and renewing attention to local contextual factors and parenting life stages.

Parenthood and Well-Being: A Decade in Review.

Alluding by its title to Adam Smith, The Cultural Wealth of Nations contributes to a field of cultural economics pioneered by scholars such as Viviana Zelizer, that explores the inseparability of economic and cultural domains and more specifically, the creation of economic value through symbolic representations, ritual, and narrative. The editors compiled a number of case studies that illumine the manner in which cultural resources (cultural ‘‘heritage,’’ narratives about artifacts and places, images shaping the perception of products and peoples) are transmuted into economic wealth. The book examines historical processes, institutions, and agents that have effected such transformations, the social actors best positioned to recoup the resulting profits, difficulties encountered in attempts to turn culture to economic ends, and tactics used to surmount them. The case studies, almost all of which usefully cross-reference one another, stress a common theme: nations, ethnic groups, and diverse economic actors may be advantaged or disadvantaged in efforts to marshal cultural resources to create economic value through ‘‘heritage’’ tourism, the ‘‘branding’’ of nations, peoples, and commodities, and the management of consumer perceptions of production processes. Several common theoretical perspectives on the transmutation of cultural resources into economic wealth underlie the specific subjects examined by each of the papers. One is that there are asymmetries and inequalities, whether between nations, ethnic and occupational groups, or producers of any marketed commodity, in the power to define cultural values and turn them to economic use. A paper on the history of heritage conservation and on the designation of UNESCO World Heritage sites offers a detailed account of the specific political history, as well as the institutionalized professional power and ethos that resulted in a clustering of designated heritage sites in wealthy nations. These nations are then better positioned than others to recoup the economic value to be culled from the exploitation of heritage sites for tourist and other commercial purposes. A transnational mobilization of conservation professionals, embedded in universities, scholarly disciplines, and cultural bureaucracies has resulted in the institutionalization of rules favoring ‘‘cultural heritage’’ production in some countries more than in others. Adopting a ‘‘global value chain perspective,’’ some papers demonstrate that in a long chain of production and marketing, in which goods are endowed with symbolic value through branding, design, and narratives targeting particular groups of consumers, the creators of added cultural value often recoup most of the economic value of the final product—for example, companies in the United Kingdom responsible for the branding of South African wine, or middlemen in Thailand selling silk cloth on the internet. Erving Goffman’s work on impression management, long turned to good use by scholars in the sociology of institutions, occupations, and tourism, is explicitly adopted here as a helpful perspective in the study of cultural economy. What are the options for a country heavily dependent upon international tourism whose image as an attractive destination is spoiled by war and widely circulated images of atrocities? Will it turn the death camps and killing fields into historical ‘‘attractions’’? Or will it attempt to erase all signs recalling its stigmatizing history, rebranding the nation as identical to that of other countries whose imagery and histories it hijacks as its own? One paper in this volume, analyzing Croatia’s tactics for managing a discreditable national identity in the interests of resuscitating its tourist industry, adopts Goffman’s theory of stigma, suggesting

Integration Interrupted: Tracking, Black Students, and Acting White after Brown

Although teenage mothers have lower educational attainment and earnings than women who delay fertility, causal interpretations of this relationship remain controversial. Scholars argue that there are reasons to predict negative, trivial, or even positive effects, and different methodological approaches provide some support for each perspective. We reconcile this ongoing debate by drawing on two heuristics: (1) each methodological strategy emphasizes different women in estimation procedures, and (2) the effects of teenage fertility likely vary in the population. Analyses of the Child and Young Adult Cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 3,661) confirm that teen pregnancy has negative effects on most women's attainment and earnings. More striking, however, is that effects on college completion and early earnings vary considerably and are most pronounced among those least likely to experience an early pregnancy. Further analyses suggest that teen pregnancy is particularly harmful for those with the brightest socioeconomic prospects and who are least prepared for the transition to motherhood.

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The Effect(s) of Teen Pregnancy: Reconciling Theory, Methods, and Findings.

Despite having lower levels of education and limited access to health care services, Mexican immigrants report better health outcomes than U.S.-born individuals. Research suggests that the Mexican health advantage may be partially attributable to selective return migration among less healthy migrants-often referred to as "salmon bias." Our study takes advantage of a rare opportunity to observe the health status of Mexican-origin males as they cross the Mexican border. To assess whether unhealthy migrants are disproportionately represented among those who return, we use data from two California-based studies: the California Health Interview Survey; and the Migrante Study, a survey that samples Mexican migrants entering and leaving the United States through Tijuana. We pool these data sources to look for evidence of health-related return migration. Results provide mixed support for salmon bias. Although migrants who report health limitations and frequent stress are more likely to return, we find little evidence that chronic conditions and self-reported health are associated with higher probabilities of return. Results also provide some indication that limited health care access increases the likelihood of return among the least healthy. This study provides new theoretical considerations of return migration and further elucidates the relationship between health and migration decisions.

Moving Beyond Salmon Bias: Mexican Return Migration and Health Selection

It is well known that Hispanic immigrants exhibit better physical and mental health than their U.S.-born counterparts. Scholars theorize that stronger orientations toward the family, also known as familism, could contribute to this immigrant advantage. Yet, little work directly tests whether familial attitudes may be responsible for the favorable health of foreign-born Hispanics. We investigate this possibility using biomarkers, anthropometrics, and mental health assessments from the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (N = 4,078). Results demonstrate that the relationship between familial attitudes and health vary depending on the outcome assessed. While Hispanics with strong attitudes toward familial support have fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety, those who report high referent familism display worse mental health outcomes. We find little evidence that familism is linked to physical health or that immigrant generation moderates the relationship of interest. Our results challenge assumptions that familism is responsible for the comparably better health of foreign-born Hispanics.

Familism and the Hispanic Health Advantage: The Role of Immigrant Status:

Although schools are important socialization venues for all children, they also serve as sites of acculturation for immigrant youth. According to segmented assimilation theory, first- and second-ge...

Christina J. Diaz

Papers

The Effect(s) of Teen Pregnancy: Reconciling Theory, Methods, and Findings.

Moving Beyond Salmon Bias: Mexican Return Migration and Health Selection

Familism and the Hispanic Health Advantage: The Role of Immigrant Status:

Educational Expectations among Immigrant Youth: Links to Segmented Assimilation and School Context:

Social mobility in the context of fathering: the intergenerational link in parenting among co-resident fathers.