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

Policy-makers are considering large-scale programs aimed at self-control to improve citizens’ health and wealth and reduce crime. Experimental and economic studies suggest such programs could reap benefits. Yet, is self-control important for the health, wealth, and public safety of the population? Following a cohort of 1,000 children from birth to the age of 32 y, we show that childhood self-control predicts physical health, substance dependence, personal finances, and criminal offending outcomes, following a gradient of self-control. Effects of children's self-control could be disentangled from their intelligence and social class as well as from mistakes they made as adolescents. In another cohort of 500 sibling-pairs, the sibling with lower self-control had poorer outcomes, despite shared family background. Interventions addressing self-control might reduce a panoply of societal costs, save taxpayers money, and promote prosperity.

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A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety

Internationally Comparable Measures of Occupational Status for the 1988 International Standard Classification of Occupations

Este libro describe un importante conjunto de habilidades clave que aumentan el aprendizaje mas profundo, la preparacion para la universidad y la carrera, el aprendizaje centrado en el estudiante y el pensamiento de orden superior. Estas etiquetas incluyen habilidades cognitivas y no cognitivas, como pensamiento critico, resolucion de problemas, colaboracion, comunicacion efectiva, motivacion, persistencia y aprender a aprender. Las habilidades del siglo XXI tambien incluyen creatividad, innovacion y etica que son importantes para el exito posterior y pueden desarrollarse en entornos de aprendizaje formales o informales. Este informe tambien describe como estas habilidades se relacionan entre si y con las habilidades y contenidos academicos mas tradicionales en las disciplinas clave de lectura, matematicas y ciencias. Educacion para la vida y el trabajo: Desarrollar conocimientos y habilidades transferibles en el siglo XXI resume los hallazgos de la investigacion que investiga la importancia de tales habilidades para el exito en la educacion, el trabajo y otras areas de responsabilidad adulta y que demuestra la importancia de desarrollar estas habilidades. en la educacion K-16. En este informe, se identifican caracteristicas relacionadas con el aprendizaje de estas habilidades, que incluyen desarrollo profesional docente, curriculo, evaluacion, programas extraescolares y extraescolares y centros de aprendizaje informal como exhibiciones y museos.

Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century

Studies of how characteristics of the family of origin are associated with educational and labor market outcomes indicate the degree of openness of societies and have a long tradition in sociology. We review research published since 1990 into educational stratification and social (occupational or class) mobility, focusing on the importance of parental socioeconomic circumstances, and with particular emphasis on comparative studies. Large-scale data now available from many countries and several time points have led to more and better descriptions of inequality of opportunity across countries and over time. However, partly owing to problems of comparability of measurement, unambiguous conclusions about trends and ranking of countries have proven elusive. In addition, no strong evidence exists that explains intercountry differences. We conclude that the 1990s witnessed a resurgence of microlevel models, mostly of a rational choice type, that signals an increased interest in moving beyond description in strat...

Inequality of opportunity in comparative perspective : Recent research on educational attainment and social mobility

Abstract In this paper we present an International Socio-Economic Index of occupational status (ISEI), derived from the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO), using comparably coded data on education, occupation, and income for 73,901 full-time employed men from 16 countries. We use an optimal scaling procedure, assigning scores to each of 271 distinct occupation categories in such a way as to maximize the role of occupation as an intervening variable between education and income (in contrast to taking prestige as the criterion for weighting education and income, as in the Duncan scale). We compare the resulting scale to two existing internationally standardized measures of occupational status, Treiman's international prestige scale (SIOPS) and Goldthorpe's class categories (EGP), and also with several locally developed SEI scales. The performance of the new ISEI scale compares favorably with these alternatives, both for the data sets used to construct the scale and for five additional data sets.

A standard international socio-economic index of occupational status

In this article, the authors report on their research on which aspects of parental cultural resources affect educational attainment and distinguish between parental beaux arts participation and parental reading behavior. Using representative data for the Netherlands in 1992 (N = 1,653), they found that parental reading behavior, not parental beaux arts participation, affects children's educational attainment. The authors also examine the validity of two alternative theories on the interaction of parents' educational background and their cultural capital (distinguishing between parental reading and beaux arts participation): Bourdieu's cultural reproduction theory and DiMaggio's cultural mobility theory. The data provide support for the cultural mobility hypothesis with respect to parental reading behavior; that is, parental reading is effective in predicting success in school, especially for children whose parents have low levels of education. here is no doubt that in modern Western societies, social origin still determines a person's educational career to a large extent. There is more disagreement, however, on whether the impact of parental social background on school success is declining. Most studies in this field have reported a stable, rather than a decreasing, association between parents' socioeconomic characteristics and offspring's educational success. In a comparative volume on historical developments in the effects of family background on educational attainment, Shavit and Blossfeld (1993) found that stability could be established in 11 out of 1 3 countries. Only for Sweden and the Netherlands, the country we focus on in this article, a historical analysis revealed a steady decline in the impact of father's educational attainment and occupational position on children's educational success for both men and women (R M. De Graaf and Ganzeboom 1993; Erikson and jonsson 1996). BACKGROUND

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2673239.pdf

Parental cultural capital and educational attainment in the netherlands: a refinement of the cultural capital perspective

The concept of social exclusion implies that there is a downward spiral in which labour market marginality leads to poverty and social isolation, which in turn reinforce the risk of long-term unemployment. The evidence in favour of this view hitherto has been largely restricted to cross-sectional data that assess the degree of association between labour market position, poverty status and patterns of sociability. In this article we seek to test more rigorously the implied causal argument by exploring the relationship between these factors over time. The article first explores whether the transition from employment to unemployment heightens the risk of poverty and social isolation, and then turns to the issue of whether poverty and social isolation significantly affect the length of time it takes people to leave unemployment for a job. It draws on data from the European Community Household Panel, which provides longitudinal data for most of the EU member states, for the period 1994 to 1996. The article con...

The total impact of the family on educational attainment

Job mobility is produced by structural forces of expansion and contraction as well as by individual choices. But labor market structure and welfare state policies will create distinctive national patterns of labor force adjustment to shifts in technology, markets, and the consequent demand for particular forms of labor. In a four‐nation comparative study, U.S. rates of job mobility showed the greatest sensitivity to structural change and to the labor market resources of individual workers. The Netherlands was at the opposite pole, with worker outcomes largely insulated from structural forces. Germany's strong labor market boundaries channeled adjustment within sectors or between employment and nonemployment, while Sweden's pattern was intermediate between that of the United States and Germany.

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Collectivist versus individualist mobility regimes? Structural change and job mobility in four countries

Economic theory predicts a negative association between spouses' levels of occupational attainment
due to gains from specialization between housework and paid work. Sociology typically stresses
facilitating effects of network resources on occupational attainment. Spouses are network members
who may be able and willing to provide such resources. According to this argument, a positive association between spouses' levels of attainment is expected. Confronting these two alternative
hypotheses, questions on the effects of spouse's resources on occupational attainment are addressed.
We analyse the Dutch Family Survey 1992/93, a survey that covers the complete job histories of about
700 couples. Hypotheses on positive and negative effects of a spouse's resources on employment
entry and exit and on job mobility are tested in an event-history analysis. The analysis shows that a
spouse's financial resources hinder occupational attainment, while a spouse's human capital has
facilitating effects, and therefore both economic and sociological theories are corroborated.

P.M. de Graaf

Papers

A standard international socio-economic index of occupational status

Parental cultural capital and educational attainment in the netherlands: a refinement of the cultural capital perspective

The total impact of the family on educational attainment

Collectivist versus individualist mobility regimes? Structural change and job mobility in four countries

Coupled careers. Effects of spouse's resources on occupational attainment in the Netherlands