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

Symposium Review: 25th Anniversary of Moral Boundaries by Joan Tronto

Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care

The Capability Approach in Practice

The overworked american

There is evidence that policy-makers in most Western welfare states are moving towards a new set of assumptions about the contributions that men and women make to families, based on an adult worker model. This paper first examines this shift in policy assumptions at the EU level and goes on to argue that there are real limits to the pursuit of a full adult worker model based on the commodification of care. In respect of gender equality, this in turn raises the issue of the terms and conditions on which such a shift in policy assumptions are made, particularly about the valuing and sharing of the unpaid work of care. The final part of the paper examines the possibilities offered by the capabilities approach of addressing these issues.

http://www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/(httpAuxPages)/BB78CF0F20C2104FC1256FF6002BA3F5/$file/giullari.pdf

The adult worker model family, gender equality and care: the search for new policy principles and the possibilities and problems of a capabilities approach

There is now agreement in the literature that the male-breadwinner-model family, in which men took primary responsibility for earning and women for the unpaid work of care, has been substantially eroded (Crompton 1999; Lewis 2001a). There is also substantial agreement that the actual patterns of family formation and dissolution and labour-market participation have changed, but there has been, if anything, a more rapid shift still in normative ideas about the contributions that women especially should make to families, and in the goals of social and labour-market policies. There is of course substantial variation between countries in the degree of change in social trends, policy assumptions and policy development. But given the steady (and in some countries dramatic) rise in female labour-market participation together with large-scale family change, which has resulted in a rapid increase in lone-mother and single-person households, policy-makers may feel justified in making assumptions regarding increasing individualization, in the sense of increasing self-sufficiency. However, parttime employment for women is extremely common in most Northern and Western European countries, which alone is sufficient to undermine any such simple assumption. How care work is to be accommodated in this new model is also a major issue, but one that has often been subordinated to economic and labour-market concerns and hence has received only partial acknowledgement in policymaking.

Susanna Giullari

Papers

The adult worker model family, gender equality and care: the search for new policy principles and the possibilities and problems of a capabilities approach

The Adult-worker-model Family and Gender Equality: Principles to Enable the Valuing and Sharing of Care