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

Do we really know what makes us happy? A review of the economic literature on the factors associated with subjective well-being

The explosion in social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Friendster is widely regarded as an exciting opportunity, especially for youth.Yet the public response tends to be one of puzzled dismay regarding a generation that, supposedly, has many friends but little sense of privacy and a narcissistic fascination with self-display. This article explores teenagers' practices of social networking in order to uncover the subtle connections between online opportunity and risk. While younger teenagers relish the opportunities to recreate continuously a highly-decorated, stylistically-elaborate identity, older teenagers favour a plain aesthetic that foregrounds their links to others, thus expressing a notion of identity lived through authentic relationships. The article further contrasts teenagers' graded conception of `friends' with the binary classification of social networking sites, this being one of several means by which online privacy is shaped and undermined by the affordances of these s...

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Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers' use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression

Poverty in the United Kingdom

This paper reports trends in educational assortative marriage from 1940 to 2003 in the U.S. Analyses of Census and Current Population Survey data show that educational homogamy increased over most of this period, although there is some evidence of stabilization in the 1990s. From 1940 to the early-1970s, these increases were generated by decreasing intermarriage among groups of relatively well educated persons. Beginning in the early-1970s, the odds of intermarriage among the highly educated stabilized while the odds that high school dropouts marry up dropped substantially. These trends are similar for a broad cross-section of married couples and for newlyweds.

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Trends in Educational Assortative Marriage From 1940 to 2003 - eScholarship

Indicators of subjective well-being have gained only limited acceptance as tools for the social-scientific analysis of human welfare, mainly because they seem insensitive to variations in the socio-economic context. However, this apparent insensitivity has been established by research which has been limited in various ways. Using data on life satisfaction for 33 European societies which goes some way to transcending these limits, this paper identifies linkages between subjective well-being and socio-economic conditions which are both strong and suggestive of important insights about national and cross-national relativities in human welfare. Populations in the rich parts of Europe have high and relatively equal life satisfaction, while those in the poorer parts of Europe have low and unequal life satisfaction. Social inequalities within rich European societies seem to have little effect on life satisfaction but they have significant effects within poor European societies. Inequalities between European soci...

Do subjective indicators measure welfare? Evidence from 33 European societies

Income poverty in the European Union (EU) is normally measured with reference to income thresholds defined at the level of each Member State, independently of any consideration of inequalities in income between Member States. This approach has come under strain as a consequence of the recent enlargement of the EU: income differences between Member States are now so wide that what is defined as the poverty threshold in the richer Member States would count as an above-average income in the poorer Member States. This article proposes that, in order to cope with empirical and policy issues arising in this new situation, measures of poverty based on EU-wide thresholds need to be utilized alongside existing measures. Indicators of objective living conditions and subjective feelings of deprivation are used to show that the very high poverty rates in poorer Member States that an EU-wide poverty measure would produce are empirically meaningful, in that they reflect the low living standards and a strong sense of deprivation experienced by large proportions of the population in those states. They are also relevant for policy, but in a context where EU anti-poverty policy is linked as much with the EU convergence project and the single EU labour market as of social policy in the usual sense.

The Case for an EU-wide Measure of Poverty

Socio-economic change in Ireland has long been tracked by research at the Economic and Social Research Institute, and from time to time, has been punctuated by volumes from the ESRI that seek to review the evidence on the character of that transformation. Best of Times? provides an assessment of the social impact of the Celtic Tiger years, drawing on the research of ESRI authors along with a number of colleagues from other institutions. Such a significant review of the recent changes in Irish economy and society seemed to the editors to merit extended discussion here in The Economic and Social Review. Reviewers were chosen to provide a mix of disciplinary backgrounds, of Irish and international institutional affiliations, and of broad perspectives on the social transformations and consequences of the Celtic Tiger boom. Best of Times? has been re-published in recent months as Fahey, T., H. Russell and C. T. Whelan (eds.), 2008. Quality of Life in Ireland: Social Impact of Economic Boom, Springer.

Best of Times? The Social Impact of the Celtic Tiger

Conflict and Consensus: A study of values and attitudes in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland

Part 1: introduction and context Chapter 1 introduction chapter 2 the international context chapter 3 local authority housing in ireland chapter 4 local authorities as landlords Part 2: findings from the study estates Chapter 5 methodology and overview of estates chapter 6 the impact of the built environment chapter 7 social structure and quality of life chapter 8 social order problems chapter 9 responses to social order problems chapter 10 relationships with local authorities chapter 11 local development agencies Part 3: summary and implications for practice Chapter 12 summary of findings chapter 13 recommendations on policy and practice

Tony Fahey

Papers

Do subjective indicators measure welfare? Evidence from 33 European societies

The Case for an EU-wide Measure of Poverty

Best of Times? The Social Impact of the Celtic Tiger

Conflict and Consensus: A study of values and attitudes in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland

Social housing in Ireland. A study of success, failure and lessons learned.