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

https://www.wsl.ch/staff/niklaus.zimmermann/papers/QuatSciRev_Kaplan_2009.pdf

The prehistoric and preindustrial deforestation of Europe

Objective.
This paper reviews trends in mortality and morbidity to evaluate whether there has been a compression of morbidity.

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Mortality and Morbidity Trends: Is There Compression of Morbidity?

Further Consideration on the Methodological Analysis of Segregation Indices.

This article estimates a dynamic model of fertility and labor supply of married women drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women, 1968–91. It distinguishes part‐time and full‐time employment sectors, which differ by pecuniary and nonpecuniary returns and transferability of human capital. The model with unobserved heterogeneity in earning ability and preferences for children fits the data and produces reasonable forecasts of labor force participation in decisions. The estimates unpack important features of the persistence in labor market decisions, intertemporal substitution of leisure over the life cycle, and the effect of work interruptions, due to childbirth, on lifetime utility.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/338220

A joint dynamic model of fertility and work of married women

Prolonged Connections: The Rise of the Extended Family in Nineteenth-Century England and America. By Steven Ruggles. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. xx + 282 pp. Cloth, $37.50; paper $15.75.)

The purpose of this study is to describe and to analyze internal migration in the USSR primarily by the use of data from the 1926 census of the USSR. The article is divided into two parts. The first is devoted to a description of the aggregate and regional migration patterns based on place-of-birth data. The second is an analysis of these migration patterns, primarily in terms of economic differentials by guberniya. Because only limited income data are available for the period around1926 and because other economic data are scarce or unusable owing to boundary changes, census data on labor force distribution, literacy, and urbanization are used as substitute variables to approximate income differences.

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Internal migration in the USSR: 1897-1926.

The authors dispute the theoretical model proposed by Friedman Hechter and Kanazawa on the value of children in developed countries that is related to the capacity to reduce uncertainty for individuals and to enhance marital solidarity for couples. The authors of this paper argue that the proposed theory has limited potential is internally inconsistent and fails empirical tests. Friedman et al. recognize other reasons for giving value to children that include the expansion of the self an outlet for creativity and desire for accomplishment and an opportunity to guide teach and exert control. It is argued that marriage creates uncertainties and it is not plausible that parenthood uncertainty is any less than uncertainty associated with labor force participation or marriage. Desire for control is more plausible as an explanation for the value of children which is in agreement with the proposed theory. However it is argued that focusing on the precise nature of why parenting occurs is not a good point of departure for exploring systematic variation in fertility behavior. It is argued the first and second hypothesis are contradictory. Evidence is given that supports a negative rather than the proposed positive relationship between divorce and fertility. Evidence is also presented that supports the opposing theory that differences between spouses in education religion race age intelligence and race are associated with a smaller family size. The literature indicates both that marital satisfaction is higher among couples who are voluntarily childless and that marital satisfaction is lower. Empirical evidence is lacking about the influence of strong support from outside sources on fertility. It is viewed as likely that the profamily context of Orthodox Jews supports higher fertility. It is argued that the proposed theory does not distinguish between marital and nonmarital childbearing. It is posited that there is strong support for the rational choice and human capital theory of fertility. Marital status is conducive to childbearing and that strong unions are likely to have higher fertility.

Comment on "a theory of the value of children"*

Population changes in Russia and the USSR : a set of comparable territorial units

The Purpose of this study is to describe and analyze the magnitude and direction of the appreciable internal migration that occurred in Russia during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The first part of the article is a description of regional migration patterns, the second part an analysis of these patterns, primarily in terms of economic differentials. Migration is a complex phenomenon. The supply of migrants to an area is related to such factors as income, distance, size of population, distribution of information, social and cultural amenities, location of resources, and government policy. Some factors may influence potential migrants more than others at a particular stage of economic development. Economic factors seem to be crucial, especially in the early stages of economic development. A useful way to interpret economic data is to compare income differences between areas. Specifically, we shall analyze the relationship between migration by guberniia and differences in indicators of income as inferred from socioeconomic data.

J. William Leasure

Papers

Prolonged Connections: The Rise of the Extended Family in Nineteenth-Century England and America. By Steven Ruggles. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. xx + 282 pp. Cloth, $37.50; paper $15.75.)

Internal migration in the USSR: 1897-1926.

Comment on "a theory of the value of children"*

Population changes in Russia and the USSR : a set of comparable territorial units

Internal Migration in Russia in the Late NVineteenth Century