世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

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

Policy-makers are considering large-scale programs aimed at self-control to improve citizens’ health and wealth and reduce crime. Experimental and economic studies suggest such programs could reap benefits. Yet, is self-control important for the health, wealth, and public safety of the population? Following a cohort of 1,000 children from birth to the age of 32 y, we show that childhood self-control predicts physical health, substance dependence, personal finances, and criminal offending outcomes, following a gradient of self-control. Effects of children's self-control could be disentangled from their intelligence and social class as well as from mistakes they made as adolescents. In another cohort of 500 sibling-pairs, the sibling with lower self-control had poorer outcomes, despite shared family background. Interventions addressing self-control might reduce a panoply of societal costs, save taxpayers money, and promote prosperity.

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A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety

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

Abstract In this paper we present an International Socio-Economic Index of occupational status (ISEI), derived from the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO), using comparably coded data on education, occupation, and income for 73,901 full-time employed men from 16 countries. We use an optimal scaling procedure, assigning scores to each of 271 distinct occupation categories in such a way as to maximize the role of occupation as an intervening variable between education and income (in contrast to taking prestige as the criterion for weighting education and income, as in the Duncan scale). We compare the resulting scale to two existing internationally standardized measures of occupational status, Treiman's international prestige scale (SIOPS) and Goldthorpe's class categories (EGP), and also with several locally developed SEI scales. The performance of the new ISEI scale compares favorably with these alternatives, both for the data sets used to construct the scale and for five additional data sets.

A standard international socio-economic index of occupational status

https://research.vu.nl/ws/files/87034982/1992_Ganzeboom_De_Graaf_Treiman_A_standard_international_socio_economic_index_of_occupational_status.pdf

Internationally Comparable Measures of Occupational Status for the 1988 International Standard Classification of Occupations

The classification and scaling of occupations constitutes the foundation of much, if not most, research on social stratification. Whether one studies access to desirable positions in societies (such as education or income), consumer styles, health outcomes, social interaction patterns, or social values and attitudes, measures of social background will more likely than not include a measure of social position derived from occupational position. In addition, the study of access to occupations is an important research topic in its own right. Ever since it was recognised that the division of labour is the kernel of social inequality, stratification researchers have developed ways to derive social status measures from information on occupations. Typically, this involves two steps. First, information about occupations is secured in a detailed classification of several hundred categories, often census or other official classifications. In comparative research with existing data, the task is often to reconcile the various classifications that have been used to code detailed occupational information in the component studies. In a second step, these detailed occupational classifications are recoded into status measures of more manageable size and sociological relevance, depending on the preferences of researchers and the nature of their research questions. There are many derived scales and broad classifications in circulation (Grusky and van Rompaey 1992).

Harry B. G. Ganzeboom

Papers

A standard international socio-economic index of occupational status

A standard international socio-economic index of occupational status

Internationally Comparable Measures of Occupational Status for the 1988 International Standard Classification of Occupations

Three Internationally Standardised Measures for Comparative Research on Occupational Status

Intergenerational class mobility in comparative perspective