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

The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Volume I. The Rise of the Network Society

Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies

Among living arrangements, living apart together relationships arouse curiosity on the part of sociologists, demographers and even the media. From a scientific point of view, how have noncohabiting relationships evolved in recent decades? How can we recognise these relationships, and who are the populations concerned? The present study provides an overall view into noncohabiting relationships in France, shedding light on the characteristics of both the individuals concerned and their relationships. There has been no recent increase in the prevalence of this living arrangement. It competes with cohabiting relationships both among students and among people with cohabiting children. Four main groups of living apart relationships are described: "Young adults", "Out of a family", "Seniors." The reasons for living apart as well as future intentions vary considerably across these groups.

Ni seuls, ni en couple. Étude des relations amoureuses stables non cohabitantes [Neither single, nor in a couple. A study of living apart together in France]

A significant percentage of men and women aged fifty and over attain new partner relationships after divorce or widowhood. Partner relationships investigated in this article include remarriage, unmarried cohabitation, and Living Apart Together (LAT). Drawing on the Dutch NESTOR-LSN survey data (n=4,494) as well as in-depth reinterviewing of repartnered older adults (n=46), this article examines elderly people’s main considerations in the decision making process leading to remarriage, a consensual union, or a LAT relationship.

The dilemma of repartnering: considerations of older men and women entering new intimate relationships in later life

Spain is one of the countries that has been most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide. As a southern European country, Spain is characterized by high levels of sociability and the vital role...

The Effects of COVID-19 Confinement on the Spanish Family: Adaptation or Change?

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are affecting ways of networking in advanced societies. This study analyzes the interaction of face-to-face social networks and digital social netw...

Individualism or complementarity? The effect of digital personal networks on face-to-face personal networks

Widowhood has traditionally been associated with the end of the family cycle; however, social and generational transformations in Spain are providing a new context for the development of new partne...

New partnerships in widowhood in Spain: Realities and desires

In recent years there has been increased interest in couples Living Apart Together (LAT) within the sociology of the family in Europe. One of the main questions concerns understanding their evoluti...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0038026118799053

What future awaits couples Living Apart Together (LAT)

The phenomenon of the Living Apart together (LAt) names partnerships that do not live habitually in the same residence. in Spain this phenomenon has increased in the last years as consequence of the retard in the familiar emancipation. nevertheless, this conceptualization groups into social very diverse realities. this study analyzes a sample of 692 women in LAt between 20 and 79 years proceeding from estudio 2,639, Fecundidad y valores en la Espana del siglo XXI elaborated by the CiS in 2006. in Spain there are 8% of women in this situation, of which 60% can be considered to be engagements. this phenome non concerns all the marital statuses, with social characteristics and different attitudes. There are 11% of “alternative” LAT to the conventional unions. They identify as the principal person of the home and reject the marriage; his profile answers to women of medium age, work independent and with children.

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Luis Ayuso

Papers

The Effects of COVID-19 Confinement on the Spanish Family: Adaptation or Change?

Individualism or complementarity? The effect of digital personal networks on face-to-face personal networks

New partnerships in widowhood in Spain: Realities and desires

What future awaits couples Living Apart Together (LAT)

LIVING APART TOGETHER EN ESPAÑA ¿Noviazgos o parejas independientes?