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

A high proportion of skilled workers in the labor force implies a large market size for skill-complementary technologies, and encourages faster upgrading of the productivity of skilled workers. As a result, an increase in the supply of skills reduces the skill premium in the short run, but then it induces skill-biased technical change and increases the skill premium, possibly even above its initial value. This theory suggests that the rapid increase in the proportion of college graduates in the United States labor force in the 1970s may have been a causal factor in both the decline in the college premium during the 1970s and the large increase in inequality during the 1980s.

/pdf/why-do-new-technologies-complement-skills-directed-technical-6mpviganuj.pdf

Why Do New Technologies Complement Skills? Directed Technical Change and Wage Inequality

Common Property Institutions and Sustainable Governance of Resources

The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of cognitive skills in promoting economic well-being, with a particular focus on the role of school quality and quantity. It concludes that there is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population – rather than mere school attainment – are powerfully related to individual earnings, to the distribution of income, and to economic growth. New empirical results show the importance of both minimal and high level skills, the complementarity of skills and quality of economic institutions, and robustness of the relationship between skills and growth. International comparisons incorporating expanded data on cognitive skills reveal much larger skill deficits in developing countries than generally derived from just school enrollment and attainment. The magnitude of change needed makes clear that closing the economic gap with developed countries will require major structural changes in schooling institutions.

The role of cognitive skills in economic development

The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of cognitive skills in pro- moting economic well-being, with a particular focus on the role of school quality and quantity. It concludes that there is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population—rather than mere school attainment—are powerfully related to indi- vidual earnings, to the distribution of income, and to economic growth. New empiri- cal results show the importance of both minimal and high level skills, the comple- mentarity of skills and the quality of economic institutions, and the robustness of the relationship between skills and growth. International comparisons incorporating expanded data on cognitive skills reveal much larger skill deficits in developing coun - tries than generally derived from just school enrollment and attainment. The mag- nitude of change needed makes clear that closing the economic gap with developed countries will require major structural changes in schooling institutions.

/pdf/the-role-of-cognitive-skills-in-economic-development-4mrvfvvdzy.pdf

The Role of Cognitive Skills in Economic Development

College Choices: The Economics of Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Pay For It

Figures and TablesForewordAcknowledgmentsPt. 1Introduction11Meeting Need and Rewarding Talent: Student Aid in the U.S. System of Higher Education Finance52Changing the Rules: The New Strategic Role of Student Aid15Pt. 2Student Aid and Educational Opportunity: Are We Keeping College Affordable?233Prices and Aid: The Growing Burden on Families254Access: Student Response to Higher Prices - and Higher Returns375Choice: How Ability to Pay Affects College Options426The Future of College Affordability49Pt. 3Student Aid and Institutional Strategy537Student Aid in Institutional Finance558How Government Aid Shapes Colleges' Behavior819Student Aid as a Competitive Weapon91Pt. 4The Special Case of Merit Aid10510Merit Aid: Its Place in History and Its Role in Society10711The Institutional Perspective11612The Student Perspective12213Conclusion: Merit Aid - Good or Bad?130Pt. VThe Future of Student Aid13314Where Do We Go from Here?135Notes145Bibliography153Index157

/pdf/the-student-aid-game-meeting-need-and-rewarding-talent-in-1tg5dp6ort.pdf

The Student Aid Game: Meeting Need and Rewarding Talent in American Higher Education

Does Student Aid Affect College Enrollment? New Evidence on a Persistent Controversy

The system of tenure that dominates American higher education has long been a source of controversy. The institution of tenure has been attacked for entrenching a lazy professoriate, more interested in attending faraway conferences and producing unreadable research than in teaching or developing practical insights, while on the other hand, it has long been defended as an absolute necessity for the defense of open intellectual inquiry. The tenure controversy has been sharpened in recent years by several events. The end of mandatory retirement, which was abolished by federal law effective January 1, 1994, has heightened concerns about the productivity and commitment of professors who received tenure long ago and who no longer have the same incentives to invest in long-term reputation. There is also ongoing concern over the steadily rising cost of higher education, which raises the question of what students—as well as the taxpayers who support public institutions of higher education—are getting for their money. 1 The idea that tenure is a wasteful institution for universities runs up against the puzzling fact that the commitment to tenure is one that academic institutions impose on themselves. Although the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) provides a powerful lobby in favor of tenure, generally colleges and universities—most notably private ones—are under no legal requirement to observe tenure constraints. Although as administrators, we certainly feel the weight of those constraints, our view is that a tenure system in fact provides important benefits to society and to colleges and universities. We argue here that the role of tenure is

/pdf/tenure-issues-in-higher-education-4lln2pe41m.pdf

Tenure Issues in Higher Education

owners and users in negotiating new, broadly based consensual guidelines. In my view, the greatest problem today with copyright at the research university is a failure to comprehend fully the importance of copyright rights. Too often, copyright is seen as no more than a legal roadblock an impediment to freedom of research, teaching, and writing. Librarians, scholars, and teachers, because their day-to-day work assumes the existence of works of author-

Morton Owen Schapiro

Papers

College Choices: The Economics of Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Pay For It

The Student Aid Game: Meeting Need and Rewarding Talent in American Higher Education

Does Student Aid Affect College Enrollment? New Evidence on a Persistent Controversy

Tenure Issues in Higher Education

Paying the piper : productivity, incentives, and financing in U.S. higher education