Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

This paper considers how identity, a person's sense of self, affects economic outcomes. We incorporate the psychology and sociology of identity into an economic model of behavior. In the utility function we propose, identity is associated with different social categories and how people in these categories should behave. We then construct a simple game-theoretic model showing how identity can affect individual interactions. The paper adapts these models to gender discrimination in the workplace, the economics of poverty and social exclusion, and the household division of labor. In each case, the inclusion of identity substantively changes conclusions of previous economic analysis.

/pdf/economics-and-identity-4squg0mykp.pdf

Economics and Identity

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

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

Using data from Australia and the United States, the authors explore the effect of spouses’ contribution to family income on how housework is divided. Consistent with exchange‐bargaining theory, women decrease their housework as their earnings increase, up to the point where both spouses contribute equally to income. In other respects, gender trumps money. The base level of housework for women is much higher. Among the small percentage of couples who are in the range where women provide 51%–100% of household income, the change in housework is opposite what exchange theory predicts: couples that deviate from the normative income standard (men make more money than women) seem to compensate with a more traditional division of household work.

/pdf/when-does-gender-trump-money-bargaining-and-time-in-51y8xc1cq0.pdf

When Does Gender Trump Money? Bargaining and Time in Household Work

Three paradoxes surround the division of the costs of social reproduction: * Women have entered the paid labour force in growing numbers, but they continue to perform most of the unpaid labour of housework and childcare. * Birth rates have fallen but more and more mothers are supporting children on their own, with little or no assistance from fathers. * The growth of state spending is often blamed on malfunctioning markets, or runaway bureaucracies. But a large percentage of social spending provides substitutes for income transfers that once took place within families. Who Pays for the Kids? explains how this paradoxical situation has arisen. The costs of social reproduction are largely paid by women: men have remained extremely reluctant to pay their share of the costs of raising the next generation. Traditional theories - neo-classical, Marxist and Feminist - can only provide an incomplete account of this, and this book offers an alternative analysis, based on individual choices but within interlocking structures of constraint based on gender, age, sex, nation, race and class.

Who Pays for the Kids?: Gender and the Structures of Constraint

The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values

This paper explores the implications for economic analysis, societal well-being, and public policy of the movement of care services (such as child and elder care) from home to market. A broad empirical overview sets the stage for the argument that this process cannot be properly evaluated using only a priori judgments about the suitability of marketization. The context in which markets operate is crucial, and while the growth of market provision poses some risks, it also offers some potential benefits.

/pdf/for-love-or-money-or-both-16m8guy2eh.pdf

For Love or Money--Or Both?

We examine the relative pay of occupations involving care, such as teaching, counseling, providing health services, or supervising children. We use panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth covering workers between 17 and 35 years of age. Care work pays less than other occupations after controlling for the education and employment experience of the workers, many occupation and industry characteristics, and (via individual fixed effects) unmeasured, stable characteristics of those who hold the jobs. Both men and women in care work pay this relative wage penalty. However, more women than men pay the penalty, since more women than men do this kind of work.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/sp.2002.49.4.455

Nancy Folbre

Papers

When Does Gender Trump Money? Bargaining and Time in Household Work

Who Pays for the Kids?: Gender and the Structures of Constraint

The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values

For Love or Money--Or Both?

Wages of Virtue: The Relative Pay of Care Work