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

Economics Of Discrimination

Suboptimal nutrition is a leading cause of poor health. Nutrition and policy science have advanced rapidly, creating confusion yet also providing powerful opportunities to reduce the adverse health and economic impacts of poor diets. This review considers the history, new evidence, controversies, and corresponding lessons for modern dietary and policy priorities for cardiovascular diseases, obesity, and diabetes mellitus. Major identified themes include the importance of evaluating the full diversity of diet-related risk pathways, not only blood lipids or obesity; focusing on foods and overall diet patterns, rather than single isolated nutrients; recognizing the complex influences of different foods on long-term weight regulation, rather than simply counting calories; and characterizing and implementing evidence-based strategies, including policy approaches, for lifestyle change. Evidence-informed dietary priorities include increased fruits, nonstarchy vegetables, nuts, legumes, fish, vegetable oils, yogurt, and minimally processed whole grains; and fewer red meats, processed (eg, sodium-preserved) meats, and foods rich in refined grains, starch, added sugars, salt, and trans fat. More investigation is needed on the cardiometabolic effects of phenolics, dairy fat, probiotics, fermentation, coffee, tea, cocoa, eggs, specific vegetable and tropical oils, vitamin D, individual fatty acids, and diet-microbiome interactions. Little evidence to date supports the cardiometabolic relevance of other popular priorities: eg, local, organic, grass-fed, farmed/wild, or non-genetically modified. Evidence-based personalized nutrition appears to depend more on nongenetic characteristics (eg, physical activity, abdominal adiposity, gender, socioeconomic status, culture) than genetic factors. Food choices must be strongly supported by clinical behavior change efforts, health systems reforms, novel technologies, and robust policy strategies targeting economic incentives, schools and workplaces, neighborhood environments, and the food system. Scientific advances provide crucial new insights on optimal targets and best practices to reduce the burdens of diet-related cardiometabolic diseases.

Dietary and Policy Priorities for Cardiovascular Disease, Diabetes, and Obesity: A Comprehensive Review

EIGHT members of the Yale Institute of Human Relations have co-operated to produce this book The result is not a mere juxtaposition of uncoordinated viewpoints but a unity of aim and consistency in presentation which make the multiple authorship almost undetectable Whatever judgment one may make about the value of the hypothesis elaborated in the book, there can be little doubt that the intimate collaboration of a team of specialists, each with a distinctive training, is a profitable way of examining a problem which has no clear-cut frontiers and which does not fall neatly into one of the conventional compartments of social study Frustration and Aggression By John Dollard Neal E Miller Leonard W Doob O H Mowrer Robert R Sears, in collaboration with Clellan S Ford, Carl Iver Hovland and Richard T Sollenberger (International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction) Pp ix + 150 (London: Kegan Paul and Co, Ltd, 1944) 10s 6d net

Frustration and Aggression

This paper describes the correlations between inequality and the growth rates in cross-country data. Using non-parametric methods, we show that the growth rate is an inverted U-shaped function of net changes in inequality: Changes in inequality (in any direction) are associated with reduced growth in the next period. The estimated relationship is robust to variations in control variables and estimation methods. This inverted U-curve is consistent with a simple political economy model, although, as we point out, efforts to interpret this model causally run into difficult identification problems. We show that this non-linearity is sufficient to explain why previous estimates of the relationship between the level of inequality and growth are so different from one another.

Inequality and Growth: What Can the Data Say?

Crimes against the historically marginalized Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SC and ST) by the upper castes in India represent an extreme form of prejudice and discrimination. In this paper, we investigate whether changes in relative material standards of living between the SCs/STs and upper castes – as measured by the ratio of consumption expenditures of SCs/STs to that of upper castes – are associated with changes in the incidence of crimes against SCs/STs. Based on the hierarchical social structure implied by the caste system, we posit that an increase in the expenditure ratio is positively correlated with the incidence of crimes committed by the upper castes against the lower castes. Using official district level crime data for the period 2001–2010, we find a positive association between crimes and expenditure of SC/ST vis-a-vis the upper castes. Further, distinguishing between violent and non-violent crimes, we find it is the violent crimes that are responsive to changes in economic gaps. Moreover, this relationship is on account of changes in the upper castes’ economic well-being rather than changes in the economic position of the SCs and STs.

/pdf/caste-based-crimes-and-economic-status-evidence-from-india-3kdmqkpov5.pdf

Caste-Based Crimes and Economic Status: Evidence from India

Caste-based crimes and economic status: Evidence from India

We use unit-level data from the registered manufacturing segment of the Third and Fourth rounds of the Indian Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) census data for 2001-2 and 2006-7 respectively, to understand the changes in involvement and dynamics not only of Dalits (officially, Scheduled Castes, or SCs), but also of other marginalized groups, specifically Adivasis (officially, Scheduled Tribes, or STs) and women, in this sector. We empirically estimate the growth rates for these enterprises and analyse the determinants, including caste and gender of the enterprise owner. We find clear and persistent caste and gender disparities in virtually all enterprise characteristics in the registered manufacturing MSME sector. The share of SC-ST ownership has declined over the period, SC-ST enterprises tend to be smaller, more rural than urban, have a greater share of owner-operated (single employee) units. The inter-state variation in share of ST-SC businesses reveals that with the exception of the tribal majority north-eastern states, SC and ST businesses are under-represented as compared to their share in state populations. The sectoral mix varies considerably by rural-urban location as well as by the caste and gender of the owner. The traditional stigmatizing association with leather-work continues to be one of the top five business activities for SCs and not for other caste groups. The gender-caste overlap indicates that the share of female-owned and female-managed enterprises is significantly greater among SC-ST-owned enterprises, than those owned by Others, and especially by Hindu upper-castes.The majority of the MSME workforce is employed in non-SC-ST owned firms. Also, there is evidence of homophily in OBC and upper-caste-owned firms, suggesting that the rise in Dalit entrepreneurship is key to increasing Dalit employment in the small business sector. While it is significant that there is now an emerging section of Dalit entrepreneurs, we find that most Dalit businesses occupy a very different place in the production chain, viz., that they are engaged in the bottom-of-the-ladder, low productivity, survival activities, as can be seen from our estimates of their lower rate of growth, after controlling for other characteristics. Thus, we find that entrepreneurship as a vehicle for social mobility for Dalits is yet to become a reality for India.

/pdf/entrepreneurship-or-survival-caste-and-gender-of-small-3zerfnxizv.pdf

Entrepreneurship or Survival? Caste and Gender of Small Business in India

Using novel data from micro, small and medium firms in Vietnam, we estimate the relationship between behavioural and personality traits of owners/managers – risk attitudes, locus of control, and innovativeness – and firm-level decisions. We extend the analysis beyond standard metrics of firm performance such as revenue and growth to study intermediate investments, including product innovation, worker training, and adoption of workplace safety measures that are potentially conducive to observed firm performance. Our results show that innovativeness and locus of control are positively correlated with revenue while risk aversion predicts lower revenue. Risk aversion is positively correlated with the adoption of safety measures. Innovativeness, as expected, is associated with an increased probability of product innovations. An internal locus of control predicts higher probability of investments, innovations and worker training. Heterogeneity analyses indicate that innovativeness and risk aversion matter more for firm outcomes in provinces characterized by better business climate. Our results are robust to a variety of checks. We contribute to a nascent and rapidly growing literature on the importance of managerial capital by shedding light on the role of managerial personality characteristics for decision-making in firms in a dynamic transition economy.

https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/Publications/Working-paper/PDF/wp2018-17.pdf

Does managerial personality matter? Evidence from firms in Vietnam

Using the 2004–2005 India Human Development Survey data, we estimate and decompose the earnings of household businesses owned by historically marginalized social groups known as Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SCSTs) and non-SCSTs across the earnings distribution. We find clear differences in characteristics between the two types of businesses with the former faring significantly worse. The mean decomposition reveals that as much as 55 % of the caste earnings gap could be attributed to the unexplained component. Quantile regressions suggest that gaps are higher at lower deciles, providing some evidence of a sticky floor. Finally, quantile decompositions reveal that the unexplained component is greater at the lower and middle deciles than higher, suggesting that SCST-owned businesses at the lower and middle end of the conditional earnings distribution face greater discrimination.

/pdf/disadvantage-and-discrimination-in-self-employment-caste-1hk2fbbp8y.pdf

Smriti Sharma

Papers

Caste-Based Crimes and Economic Status: Evidence from India

Caste-based crimes and economic status: Evidence from India

Entrepreneurship or Survival? Caste and Gender of Small Business in India

Does managerial personality matter? Evidence from firms in Vietnam

Disadvantage and discrimination in self-employment: caste gaps in earnings in Indian small businesses