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

Nos últimos trinta trinta anos, houve profundas mudanças na forma como compreendemos o crime e a justiça criminal. O crime tornou-se um evento simbólico, um verdadeiro teste para a ordem social e para as políticas governamentais, um desafio para a sociedade civil, para a democracia e para os direitos humanos. Segundo David Garland, professor da Faculdade de Direito da New York University, um dos principais autores no campo da Sociologia da Punição e com artigo publicado na Revista de Sociologia e Política , número 13, na modernidade tardia houve uma verdadeira obsessão securitária, direcionando as políticas criminais para um maior rigor em relação às penas e maior intolerância com o criminoso. Há trinta anos, nos EUA e na Inglaterra essa tendência era insuspeita. O livro mostra que os dois países compartilham intrigantes similaridades em suas práticas criminais, a despeito da divisão racial, das desigualdades econômicas e da letalidade violenta que marcam fortemente o cenário americano. Segundo David Garland, encontram-se nos dois países os “mesmos tipos de riscos e inseguranças, a mesma percepção a respeito dos problemas de um controle social não-efetivo, as mesmas críticas da justiça criminal tradicional, e as mesmas ansiedades recorrentes sobre mudança e ordem sociais”1 (GARLAND, 2001, p. 2). O argumento principal da obra é o seguinte: a modernidade tardia, esse distintivo padrão de relações sociais, econômicas e culturais, trouxe consigo um conjunto de riscos, inseguranças e problemas de controle social que deram uma configuração específica às nossas respostas ao crime, ao garantir os altos custos das políticas criminais, o grau máximo de duração das penas e a excessivas taxas de encarceramento.

http://www.scielo.br/pdf/rsocp/n20/n20a15.pdf

The culture of control: crime and social order in contemporary, society

This paper undertakes an assessment of a rapidly growing body of economic research on financial literacy. We start with an overview of theoretical research which casts financial knowledge as a form of investment in human capital. Endogenizing financial knowledge has important implications for welfare as well as policies intended to enhance levels of financial knowledge in the larger population. Next, we draw on recent surveys to establish how much (or how little) people know and identify the least financially savvy population subgroups. This is followed by an examination of the impact of financial literacy on economic decision-making in the United States and elsewhere. While the literature is still young, conclusions may be drawn about the effects and consequences of financial illiteracy and what works to remedy these gaps. A final section offers thoughts on what remains to be learned if researchers are to better inform theoretical and empirical models as well as public policy.

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The Economic Importance of Financial Literacy: Theory and Evidence

This chapter explores the ecology of human development, those forces in the person's environment that affect and influence development. Urie Bronfenbrenner's model of the human ecosystem guides the discussion, making connections between children in families and in communities and the larger society that surrounds them. The human ecosystem model is much like the study of the natural ecology, focusing on the interactions between subjects at various levels of the environment as they affect each other. The interaction between individual and environment forms the basis of an ecological approach to human development. This view sees the process of development as the expansion of the child's conception of the world and the child's ability to act on that world. Risks to development can come from both direct threats and the absence of opportunities for development. Sociocultural risk refers to the impoverishment in the child's world of essential experiences and relationships.

The Ecology of Human Development

This paper undertakes an assessment of a rapidly growing body of economic research on financial literacy. We start with an overview of theoretical research, which casts financial knowledge as a form of investment in human capital. Endogenizing financial knowledge has important implications for welfare, as well as policies intended to enhance levels of financial knowledge in the larger population. Next, we draw on recent surveys to establish how much (or how little) people know and identify the least financially savvy population subgroups. This is followed by an examination of the impact of financial literacy on economic decision making in the United States and elsewhere. While the literature is still young, conclusions may be drawn about the effects and consequences of financial illiteracy and what works to remedy these gaps. A final section offers thoughts on what remains to be learned if researchers are to better inform theoretical and empirical models as well as public policy. (JEL A20, D14, G11, I20, J26)

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The economic importance of financial literacy: theory and evidence

The literature on father absence is frequently criticized for its use of cross-sectional data and methods that fail to take account of possible omitted variable bias and reverse causality. We review studies that have responded to this critique by employing a variety of innovative research designs to identify the causal effect of father absence, including studies using lagged dependent variable models, growth curve models, individual fixed effects models, sibling fixed effects models, natural experiments, and propensity score matching models. Our assessment is that studies using more rigorous designs continue to find negative effects of father absence on offspring well-being, although the magnitude of these effects is smaller than what is found using traditional cross-sectional designs. The evidence is strongest and most consistent for outcomes such as high school graduation, children's social-emotional adjustment, and adult mental health.

The Causal Effects of Father Absence

We examine households’ financial fragility by looking at their capacity to come up with $2,000 in 30 days. Using data from the 2009 TNS Global Economic Crisis Study, we document that approximately one-quarter of U.S. respondents are certain they could not come up with that sum. If we include respondents who report being probably unable to do so, nearly half of respondents are financially fragile. Although financial fragility is more severe among low-income households, a sizable fraction of seemingly middle-class Americans are also at risk. Respondents with low educational attainment and no financial education, families with children, those who have suffered large wealth losses, and the unemployed are also more likely than others to report being unable to cope with a financial shock. Households’ own savings are the resource used most often to deal with shocks, but resources of family and friends, formal and alternative credit, increased work hours, and sale of possessions are also used frequently, especially among some subgroups. These results indicate the need to look beyond precautionary savings to understand how families cope. We also find evidence suggestive of a “pecking order” of coping methods, with savings first in line. Comparing financial fragility and methods of coping among the United States and seven other industrialized countries, we find differences in coping ability but also general evidence of a consistent ordering of methods.

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Financially Fragile Households: Evidence and Implications

Research on precarious work and its consequences overwhelmingly focuses on the economic dimension of precarity, epitomized by low wages. But the rise in precarious work also involves a major shift in its temporal dimension, such that many workers now experience routine instability in their work schedules. This temporal instability represents a fundamental and under-appreciated manifestation of the risk shift from firms to workers. A lack of suitable existing data, however, has precluded investigation of how precarious scheduling practices affect workers' health and well-being. We use an innovative approach to collect survey data from a large and strategically selected segment of the U.S. workforce: hourly workers in the service sector. These data reveal that exposure to routine instability in work schedules is associated with psychological distress, poor sleep quality, and unhappiness. Low wages are also associated with these outcomes, but unstable and unpredictable schedules are much more strongly associated. Precarious schedules affect worker well-being in part through the mediating influence of household economic insecurity, yet a much larger proportion of the association is driven by work-life conflict. The temporal dimension of work is central to the experience of precarity and an important social determinant of well-being.

Consequences of Routine Work-Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Well-Being:

In the United States, the Great Recession was marked by severe negative shocks to labor market conditions. In this study, we combine longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study with U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data on local area unemployment rates to examine the relationship between adverse labor market conditions and mothers' experiences of abusive behavior between 2001 and 2010. Unemployment and economic hardship at the household level were positively related to abusive behavior. Further, rapid increases in the unemployment rate increased men's controlling behavior toward romantic partners even after we adjust for unemployment and economic distress at the household level. We interpret these findings as demonstrating that the uncertainty and anticipatory anxiety that go along with sudden macroeconomic downturns have negative effects on relationship quality, above and beyond the effects of job loss and material hardship.

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Intimate Partner Violence in the Great Recession

The economic effects of the Great Recession have been readily apparent in high levels of unemployment and unprecedented levels of mortgage foreclosure. These economic effects have also had important social consequences for American families. The Great Recession led some couples to put off divorce (Cherlin, Cumberworth, Morgan, & Wimer, 2013; Cohen, 2014), reduced relationship quality (Schneider, Harknett, & McLanahan, 2014), and increased doubling-up in households (Wiemers, 2014). It also appears that the Great Recession lowered fertility in the United States. This question has received enormous attention in the popular press but has been subject to little detailed demographic analysis. The relationship between recession and fertility captures the public interest and is of academic note both because it speaks to the real social effects of economic downturns and also because such patterns reveal a regularity in social life, a way in which surprising economic events may have predictable effects.Analyses of the effect of economic conditions on fertility in the United States have a long scholarly history (Ogburn & Thomas, 1922). Seminal work by Rindfuss, Morgan, and Swicegood (1988) found a negative relationship between first births and unemployment in a period including the Great Depression. In addition, a number of studies have examined the relationship between normal business cycles and fertility and found evidence of modest negative effects over the second half of the 20th century (e.g., Schaller, 2012). A much larger body of research has investigated how economic conditions have affected fertility in Europe and has found evidence of negative effects across a number of countries (Sobotka, Skirbekk, & Philipov, 2011). All of this work has sought to understand the social effects of macro-economic variation and sharp downturns.Several recent studies have provided early evidence that the Great Recession has reduced fertility (Ananat, Gassman-Pines, & Gibson-Davis, 2013; Cherlin et al., 2013; Morgan, Cumberland, & Wimer, 2011a). However, our understanding of the Great Recession's effects on fertility remains incomplete. First, the few studies to date have not considered the full time span of the Great Recession, which, when measured by periods of high foreclosure or high unemployment, spanned a period much longer than the official recession years of 2008-2009. Also, nearly all work on the recession and fertility has focused on unemployment to the exclusion of foreclosure, yet foreclosure was a key aspect of economic distress in the Great Recession. Moreover, foreclosure may capture important social and economic processes that are not measured by unemployment alone. For example, women living in states with higher rates of foreclosure may have experienced greater declines in home value even on non-foreclosed homes (Harding, Rosenblatt, & Yao, 2009), and exposure to high rates of foreclosure, net of other economic conditions, appears to have important effects on mental health (Houle & Light, 2014) and, as Houle (2014) argued, on the the social organization and resources of communities.Second, the role of economic uncertainty has loomed large in the discussion of the causes of the Great Recession. For instance, Akerlof and Schiller's (2009) prominent account of emotions and the economy focused on the role of Keynesian "animal spirits" in driving the economy. Though scholars of European fertility have examined how economic uncertainty about the likelihood of future negative events may shape childbearing (e.g., Hofmann & Hohmeyer, 2013), very little attention has been given to the role of the Great Recession in creating such economic uncertainty at the household level and of the consequences of such emotional responses for demographic behavior in the United States.In this article, I draw on panels of state(2001-2012) and county-level (2001-2010) fertility data in conjunction with data at the county, state, divisional, regional, and national levels on unemployment, the employment-to-population ratio, foreclosures, consumer confidence, and press coverage of the recession to estimate panel models of the effects of recession on fertility. …

Daniel Schneider

Papers

The Causal Effects of Father Absence

Financially Fragile Households: Evidence and Implications

Consequences of Routine Work-Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Well-Being:

Intimate Partner Violence in the Great Recession

The Great Recession, Fertility, and Uncertainty: Evidence From the United States