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

Men and Women of the Corporation

This survey of sexual practices in the United States has been combed by the media for items of interest to the public: monogamous sex is much more widespread in this country than has been thought; infidelity is less frequent than presumed; vaginal intercourse is the defining experience of heterosexual behavior; watching one's partner undress is stimulating to many people; married couples have more sex than single people (unmarried, cohabiting couples have the most sex of all); the majority of couples experience sex twice a week to several times a month; 2.8% of men identify themselves as homosexual and 1.4% of women do so, but a higher percentage of people consider a same-gender experience to have some appeal; 75% of men always experience orgasm compared with 28.6% of women, but more nearly equal numbers of men and women declare themselves satisfied with their sexual experiences. The book is, in fact, a

The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States

This paper reports trends in educational assortative marriage from 1940 to 2003 in the U.S. Analyses of Census and Current Population Survey data show that educational homogamy increased over most of this period, although there is some evidence of stabilization in the 1990s. From 1940 to the early-1970s, these increases were generated by decreasing intermarriage among groups of relatively well educated persons. Beginning in the early-1970s, the odds of intermarriage among the highly educated stabilized while the odds that high school dropouts marry up dropped substantially. These trends are similar for a broad cross-section of married couples and for newlyweds.

/pdf/trends-in-educational-assortative-marriage-from-1940-to-2003-2x4odsxvpk.pdf

Trends in Educational Assortative Marriage From 1940 to 2003 - eScholarship

The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially. Linda J. Waite & Maggie Gallagher. New York: Doubleday. 2000. 260 pp. ISBN 0-38550085-8. $24.95 cloth. Marriage, our second oldest institution, has been controversial during most of its existence. In The Bankruptcy of Marriage, Calverton (1928) observed, "It is marriage as we know it... the marriage of modern monogamy, of the bindingcontract variety, our system of marriage, in other words, that has broken down, and to-day is bankrupt" (p. 62). Given its age and its undisputed importance, marriage has long been challenged and defended. The Case for Marriage offers a spirited and well-documented but flawed example of such a defense. First, its use of language is far from neutral. Its tone oozes with disrespect for those who deviate from lifelong marriage. Marriage throughout the text is referred to as a "bargain," a superior investment benefiting both those who participate and society at large. Cohabitation, on the other hand, is a "deal," something one picks up at a flea market. Cohabiting partners, regardless of their age, are referred to as "live-in" boy- or girlfriends and are described as "couples living together without commitment" (p. 190). Adult singles are treated as a residual category. As constructionists remind us, the use of language is not just a descriptive but a creative and frequently assertive activity. My second concern is conceptual. Marriage institutionalizes the legitimacy of offspring in human societies. Children born in it, regardless of its form, are considered "legitimate" and belong to a kinship network. The marriage institution, then, has a clear stake in its procreative consequences, as is exemplified by its sole universal rule, the "incest taboo." Its main "enemy" is promiscuous reproduction. Its "allies" are those other forms of "living together" that, regardless of their duration, counter random mating. "Family," the oldest human institution, traditionally is responsible for "caring" for the very young, and nowadays also for the aged. It seems impossible to imagine humanity's pilgrimage without these two institutions. It is quite possible, however, to imagine each one taking on a variety of forms. The core units of the marriage and family institutions are, respectively, married couples and family networks. The bulk of Waite's and Gallagher's book is not about the institutions of marriage and family, but rather about individuals who choose to participate in marital and familial units. They conceptualize marriage as more than a "private emotional relationship" and specify a "lifelong commitment to form a new family" (p. 187) as its raison d'etre. They use the words marriage and family interchangeably. This is confusing. For example, are voluntarily childless married couples to be considered deviants? Uncommitted? What about one-parent families? Are they a different legitimate family form or, as the authors seem to imply, simply an outcome of unwed motherhood, marital failure, or early spousal death? I agree with the authors that marriage's "larger public role must be acknowledged and supported by the larger society and its institutions" (p. 187). All social arrangements, whether sacred or profane, to use Durkheim's terminology, that combat reproductive promiscuity or inadequate family care deserve support from "society and its institutions." The authors' treatment of cohabitation is equally troublesome to me. Analytically, cohabitation, in its many manifestations, should not be contrasted or compared with marriage but rather with the equally diverse category of singlehood. I have no problem with the multitude of quantitative data amassed by the authors to show that enduring marriages and families, on the average, offer some distinct advantages over cohabitation. …

The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better off Financially

Mothers are shown to receive lower wages than childless women across industrial countries. Although research on mothers’ wage disadvantage has noted that the extent of this disadvantage is not univ...

The Motherhood Wage Penalty by Work Conditions: How Do Occupational Characteristics Hinder or Empower Mothers?:

Explanations for the positive association between education and marriage in the United States emphasize the economic and cultural attractiveness of having a college degree in the marriage market. However, educational attainment may also shape the opportunities that men and women have to meet other college-educated partners, particularly in contexts with significant educational stratification. We focus on work—and the social ties that it supports—and consider whether the educational composition of occupations is important for marriage formation during young adulthood. Employing discrete-time event-history methods using the NLSY-97, we find that occupational education is positively associated with transitioning to first marriage and with marrying a college-educated partner for women but not for men. Moreover, occupational education is positively associated with marriage over cohabitation as a first union for women. Our findings call attention to an unexplored, indirect link between education and marriage that, we argue, offers insight into why college-educated women in the United States enjoy better marriage prospects.

https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/_files/kraley/McClendonKuoRaley14.pdf

Opportunities to Meet: Occupational Education and Marriage Formation in Young Adulthood

The rise of cohabitation in family process among American young adults and declining rates of marriage among cohabitors are considered by some scholars as evidence for the importance of society-wide ideational shifts propelling recent changes in family. With data on two cohabiting cohorts from the NSFG 1995 and 2006-2010, the current study finds that marriage rates among cohabitors have declined steeply among those with no college degree, resulting in growing educational disparities over time. Moreover, there are no differences in marital intentions by education (or race/ethnicity) among recent cohabitors. We discuss how findings of this study speak to the changes in the dynamics of social stratification system in the United States and suggest that institutional and material constraints are at least as important as ideational accounts in understanding family change and family behavior of contemporary young adults.

Diverging Patterns of Union Transition Among Cohabitors by Race/Ethnicity and Education: Trends and Marital Intentions in the United States

Using data from the NLSY 97, this paper investigates how work characteristics (earnings and autonomy) shape young adults' transition to first marriage separately for men and women. The results suggest that earnings are positively associated with marriage and that this association is as strong for women as men in their mid-to-late twenties. Additionally, occupational autonomy-having the control over one's own work structure-facilitates entry into first marriage for women in their mid-to late-20s but, for men, occupational autonomy is not associated with marriage at these ages. These results suggest that even as women's earnings are increasingly important for marriage, other aspects of work are also important for stable family formation.

https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/_files/kraley/KuoRaley14.pdf

Is It All About Money? Work Characteristics and Women’s and Men’s Marriage Formation in Early Adulthood

Many single adult children in countries around the world live with their parents. Such coresidence has been thought to delay the transition to first marriage, although the exact reasons for the delay have not been sufficiently examined. Using panel data from Japan, we investigate whether changes in never-married adults’ residential status lead to alterations in their marital aspirations, courtship behaviors, romantic opportunities, and perceived obstacles to marrying. Our estimation of fixed-effects models helps address potential bias caused by single individuals’ selection into living in the parental home. The analysis indicates that living with parents is associated with a lower probability of forming romantic relationships, thereby decelerating the transition to first marriage. The never-married, however, do not desire marriage less, put less effort into finding romantic partners, or have fewer opportunities to meet potential partners when coresiding with parents. Overall, the findings suggest that living in the parental home increases never-married men’s contentment with their immediate social environment, whereas it decreases women’s psychological readiness to transition into adult roles, making both men and women less eager to settle into a romantic relationship.

/pdf/explaining-the-effect-of-parent-child-coresidence-on-56ltj7sdsu.pdf

Janet Chen-Lan Kuo

Papers

The Motherhood Wage Penalty by Work Conditions: How Do Occupational Characteristics Hinder or Empower Mothers?:

Opportunities to Meet: Occupational Education and Marriage Formation in Young Adulthood

Diverging Patterns of Union Transition Among Cohabitors by Race/Ethnicity and Education: Trends and Marital Intentions in the United States

Is It All About Money? Work Characteristics and Women’s and Men’s Marriage Formation in Early Adulthood

Explaining the Effect of Parent-Child Coresidence on Marriage Formation: The Case of Japan