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

Causes and implications of the recent Increase in the reported Sex-Ratio at Birth in China

This collection of 20 articles, all of high quality, is designed for students of Chinese culture, for psychiatrists and psychologists, and for those concerned with extending the comparative study of human behavior and psychopathology beyond Western populations. The data, as the authors point out, are drawn largely from Chinese communities outside the People's Republic of China. Nevertheless, they write, "there is a considerable consensus that despite China's cultural heterogeneity, a single, tradition-rooted set of shared orientations has been extremely widespread and has played a leading if not modal role in China's cultural evolution coming down to the present." Six of the papers address beliefs and values governing behavior, three are concerned with child development, three with family studies, and eight with clinical and epidemiologic psychiatry. The introductory chapter prepares the reader for an understanding of key Chinese cultural issues; these include emphasis on the management of interpersonal encounters as more

Normal and Abnormal Behavior in Chinese Culture

Marriage is a near universal practice in China, associated with social adulthood, status and success (Lee and Wang, 1999; Jones, 2005; Sheng, 2005; Evans, 2007). Strong family and social pressure is exerted on young women and men to get married (Zhang and Zhong, 2005; Li et al., 2010), and not getting married is still unusual (Eklund, 2016a). At the same time, men have been subject to a ‘marriage squeeze’ due to a shortage of women in the marriage market. Historically, this shortage stemmed from disproportionately high female mortality rates (Banister 2004) and the practice of concubinage in pre-1949 China (Eklund, 2013). Today, the male marriage squeeze is fuelled by falling birth rates, where younger birth cohorts, smaller than older ones, generate a shortage of women when men from older birth cohorts marry younger women (Attané, 2013). Moreover, as the generations born from the 1980s with their increasingly skewed sex ratios in favour of males reach marriageable age, the male marriage squeeze will be further exacerbated. Studies have estimated that among cohorts born between 1980 and 2000, 22 million more men than women were born (Ebenstein and Sharygin, 2009). Attané (2006) estimates that the sex ratio among people aged 15–49 will continue to increase into the future, reaching 117–120 in 2050, while Tucker and Hook (2013) project that the number of single men aged 25–39 will peak at almost 30 million in 2030. Despite differences with regards to numbers and time frame, there is evidence that the male marriage squeeze will intensify over the decades to come. How do men respond to the marriage squeeze in China? What strategies do they deploy to find a spouse? How are women’s mate selection practices affected by their numeric shortage? Does the marriage squeeze affect the rate and timing of marriage, and does it lead to alternative mate selection practices? Those are some of the questions previous studies have engaged with. The aim of this chapter is to offer an overview of available research on mate selection in the context of a marriage squeeze, and to discuss the findings in relation to different theoretical perspectives. Special emphasis is placed on investigating the impact of high sex ratios and ‘surplus’ men on mate selection. The situations of ‘leftover’ women in China will not be dealt with explicitly (see Gaetano in this volume).

Marriage squeeze and mate selection in China

新中国人口六十年 = Sixty years of new China population

Despite the universality of marriage in Chinese society, involuntary bachelorhood exists, and is becoming an increasingly critical issue. While many studies have addressed the problem from the standpoint of demographic imbalance, we argue that the issue should be understood as a manifestation of the gendered features of the marriage system which work against low-class men. This understanding relates involuntary bachelorhood to the combined effects of spouse selection and marriage practices. To elaborate our argument, the present study explores nuptiality plights of involuntary bachelors. In particular, it examines their marginalisation in the marriage market, defiant choices in the face of market exclusion, and instability of marital relationships.

Li Zhang

Papers

Involuntary Bachelorhood in Rural China