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

Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

25. Multiple Imputation for Nonresponse in Surveys. By D. B. Rubin. ISBN 0 471 08705 X. Wiley, Chichester, 1987. 258 pp. £30.25.

Multiple Imputation for Nonresponse in Surveys

All these premises having, as I think, been clearly made out, it is impossible that the rulers now on earth should make any benefit, or derive any the least shadow of authority from that, which is held to be the fountain of all power, Adam's private dominion and paternal jurisdiction; so that he that will not give just occasion to think that all government in the world is the product only of force and violence, and that men live together by no other rules but that of beasts, where the strongest carries it, and so lay a foundation for perpetual disorder and mischief, tumult, sedition and rebellion, (things that the followers of that hypothesis so loudly cry out against) must of necessity find out another rise of government, another original of political power, and another way of designing and knowing the persons that have it, than what Sir Robert Filmer hath taught us.

Two Treatises of Government.

The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

The increase in economic disparities over the past 30 years has prompted extensive research on the causes and consequences of inequality both in the United States and, more recently, globally. This review provides an update of research on the patterns and causes of economic inequality in the United States, including inequality of earnings, wealth, and opportunity. We also explore the social and political consequences of inequality, particularly in the areas of health, education, crime, social capital, and political power. Finally, we spotlight an emerging literature on world inequality, which examines inequality trends within as well as across nations. Sociologists can advance research on inequality by bringing discipline-based expertise to bear on the organization and political economy of firms and labor markets, the pathways through which inequality has an effect, and the social, political, and cultural contingencies that might modify this effect.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/29737766.pdf

Inequality: Causes and Consequences

A growing body of research highlights that in utero conditions are consequential for individual outcomes throughout the life cycle, but research assessing causal processes is scarce. This article examines the effect of one such condition—prenatal maternal stress—on birth weight, an early outcome shown to affect cognitive, educational, and socioeconomic attainment later in life. Exploiting a major earthquake as a source of acute stress and using a difference-in-difference methodology, I find that maternal exposure to stress results in a significant decline in birth weight and an increase in the proportion of low birth weight. This effect is focused on the first trimester of gestation, and it is mediated by reduced gestational age rather than by factors affecting the intrauterine growth of term infants. The findings highlight the relevance of understanding the early emergence of unequal outcomes and of investing in maternal well-being since the onset of pregnancy.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/41408198

The effect of maternal stress on birth outcomes: exploiting a natural experiment

background: Previous research suggests that maternal exposure to acute stress has a negative impact on the duration of pregnancy, and that this effect may vary by the time of exposure. It has also been proposed that stress exposure reduces the ratio of male-to-female births. To date, no study has jointly examined both outcomes, although they may be strongly related. Using population-level data with no selectivity, we jointly study the sex-specific effect of stress on the duration of pregnancy and the observed sex ratio among pregnant women exposed to a major earthquake in Chile. methods: In a quasi-experimental design, women exposed to the earthquake in different months of gestation were compared with women pregnant 1 year earlier. Estimates from a comparison group of pregnant women living in areas not affected by the earthquake were also examined to rule out confounding trends. Regression models were used to measure the impact of earthquake exposure on gestational age and preterm birth by sex across month of gestation. A counterfactual simulation was implemented to assess the effect of the earthquake on the secondary sex ratio accounting for the differential impact of stress on gestational age by sex. results: Earthquake exposure in Months 2 and 3 of gestation resulted in a significant decline in gestational age and increase in preterm delivery. Effects varied by sex, and were much larger for female than male pregnancies. Among females, the probability of preterm birth increased by 0.038 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.005, 0.072] in Month 2 and by 0.039 (95% CI: 0.002, 0.075) in Month 3. Comparable increases for males were insignificant at the conventional P , 0.05 level. After accounting for the sex-specific impact on gestational age, a decline in the male-to-female ratio in Month 3 of exposure was detected [20.058 (95% CI: 20.113, 20.003)]. conclusions: Maternal exposure to an exogenous stressor early but not late in the pregnancy affects gestational age and the probability of preterm birth. This effect is much stronger in females than males. Stress exposure in early pregnancy may also contribute to a decline in the ratio of male-to-female live births in exposed cohorts.

Prenatal stress, gestational age and secondary sex ratio: the sex-specific effects of exposure to a natural disaster in early pregnancy

A major finding in comparative mobility research is the high similarity across countries and the lack of association between mobility and other national attributes, with one exception: higher inequality seems to be associated with lower mobility. Evidence for the mobility-inequality link is, however, inconclusive, largely because most mobility studies have been conducted in advanced countries with relatively similar levels of inequality. This article introduces Chile to the comparative project. As the 10th most unequal country in the world, Chile is an adjudicative case. If high inequality results in lower mobility, Chile should be significantly more rigid than its industrialized peers. This hypothesis is disproved by the analysis. Despite vast economic inequality, Chile is as fluid, if not more so, than the much more equal industrialized nations. Furthermore, there is no evidence of a decline in mobility as the result of the increase in inequality during the market-oriented transformation of the country ...

Florencia Torche

Papers

Inequality: Causes and Consequences

The effect of maternal stress on birth outcomes: exploiting a natural experiment

Prenatal stress, gestational age and secondary sex ratio: the sex-specific effects of exposure to a natural disaster in early pregnancy

Unequal But Fluid: Social Mobility in Chile in Comparative Perspective

Bringing the Schools Back in: The Stratification of Educational Achievement in the Chilean Voucher System.