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

Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology

The Fall of Public Man

One in a while, every twenty years perhaps, a book appears that makes one see a whole area of human experience in a new light. Once pointed out, the new insights are sp obvious that one cannot understand how one could have missed them before. In the broad area of the political economy of western society, J.A. Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943) was one such book. So, with all its faults, was J.K. Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1957). Fred Hirsch's Social Limits to Growth (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1977) is another.

Social limits to growth

Zakljucno, potrebno je i nadalje svakodnevno raditi na prevenciji demencije, osiguravati resurse i osmisljavati strategije borbe protiv demencije, jer ce broj osoba s demencijom i u Hrvatskoj u buducnosti biti veci. No, s obzirom da se u svijetu ulažu znatna sredstva u podrucju istraživanja demencije, za ocekivati je pozitivnih pomaka, kako na podrucju terapije, rane dijagnostike, tako i na podrucju rehabilitacije osoba s demencijom. Stoga - vrijeme je na nasoj strani!

/pdf/dementia-a-public-health-priority-4d8cnsux7q.pdf

Dementia: a public health priority

Purpose - – The purpose of this study is to discuss the ongoing increase of female entrepreneurship within a broader context of influencing factors, especially within the division of work. Talk about the rise and future of self-employment must be linked to the discussion about changes in the structure of occupations, labour markets and regulations and gender. The increase of the service sector and the continuous rise of the liberal professions mirror changes within the category of self-employment. All different items are embedded into a general trend of a growing knowledge society. A fundamental question is how gender matters when investigating these trends. Do we find specific “gender patterns” or will the new chances and risks lead to a greater equality of opportunities? Is the increase of solo self-employment of females driven by the need to earn a living, or is it the result of females taking the risk, e.g., to become more economically independent? Design/methodology/approach - – The paper combines conceptual thoughts on the development of self-employment and gender within stratified modern societies with empirical reflections based on public census data for Germany. The research delves deeper into the different segments of the employment system and connects empirical findings with the theoretical discussion on professional groups in modern capitalist societies. Findings - – We learn to acknowledge that the rise of self-employment is mostly supported by the rise of micro-firms and solo self-employment, of which especially solo self-employment is a female domain. The independent liberal professions also indicate a significant revival of female labour. Originality/value - – The paper highlights the increasing expansion of self-employment and specific gender patterns within this trend.

Between Need and Innovative Challenge: Observations on Female Solo-Self-employment in Germany

The study focuses on the usage of income in Germany as well as in Lower Saxony. Concretely, the material situation of the German and the Lower Saxonian persons in the household context and their willingness for expenditures are stated. As database the scientific use file of the Income and Expenditure Survey (Einkommens- und Verbrauchsstichprobe, EVS) 2003 is used. In detail, calculations especially concerning the item “living” are made. Furthermore, income and price elasticities are computed in order to find out (with respect to the elasticity of demand behavior) whether there are remarkable differences between Germany as a whole and Lower Saxony.
In the empirical part of the study we found commonalities but also some differences between both regional units. Examples for differences are the higher proportions of ownership, higher average and marginal consumption rates, and lower “minimum expenditures” in Lower Saxony than in Germany as a whole. These results are coherent with the higher demand elasticities in Lower Saxony compared to Germany as a whole. Such divergencies were also revealed in the following socio-demographic differentiations: age of the household’s head, age of all household members, sex of the household’s head, nationality of the household’s head, household type, and household size, although they have been statistically not significant frequently.

Ausgabenanalysen für Deutschland und Niedersachsen – Berechnungsergebnisse auf Basis der Einkommens‐ und Verbrauchsstichprobe 2003

The paper deals with margins of entrepreneurship where small business owners are almost working on
their own having no or just a few employees and where one can find also people working with low
returns and having firms without stability or prosperous dynamics. However, even the area of
entrepreneurship at the margins seems to be a wide field. It highlights not only the broad margins of
entrepreneurship but also the fluent boarders between entrepreneurship and the informal sector on the
one side and the system of the labour market on the other. New firms – even those which are very
successful at a later point of career – are almost created in an experimental period of testing market and
product ideas in which business founders are still employed or registered as unemployed people. The
practical starting-point of an entrepreneurial existence falls into a fluent continuum of different activities
being closely connected to spheres of dependent work as employees or periods of seeking a new job
during unemployment.
With growing solo self-employment a new social phenomenon in the structure of the labour market and
the division of occupations has emerged in which different social developments are overlapping each
other. The question for the landscape of solo self-employment and related driving forces of their
emergence is of crucial research interest: Must they be regarded primarily as a result of pushes by
labour market deficiencies or are they a response to new life-styles and working demands which act as
pulling factors into self-employment? In other words, does solo self-employment serve as a valve of a
pressing labour market or must it be regarded more positively as a new option of the classic division of
labour by which an increasing number of people find new self-reliant and also stable jobs? The idea of
the paper is to discuss this particular issue of margins of entrepreneurship not only within the
conventional scope of entrepreneurship discussion but within an integrated framework which combines
entrepreneurship analysis with labour market research and studies on social stratification and social
mobility. The paper will not come about with definite last answers but hopes to contribute to that debate
by presenting better information.
Der Beitrag behandelt die Thematik des Grenzbereichs des Unternehmertums, charakterisiert als ein
Bereich, in dem Kleinunternehmer zumeist alleine – mitunter unterstutzt von einigen wenigen
Beschaftigten – mit niedrigen Ertragen und einer hohen Unsicherheit hinsichtlich der weiteren Existenz
des Unternehmens bzw. ohne eine vielversprechende Dynamik arbeiten. Aber selbst dieser
Untersuchungsbereich stellt ein weites Feld dar. Er betont nicht nur die grose Bandbreite des
Unternehmertums, sondern ebenso die fliesenden Ubergange zwischen Unternehmertum und
informellem Sektor einerseits sowie dem Arbeitsmarkt auf der anderen Seite. Neue Unternehmen –
selbst diejenigen, die spater sehr erfolgreich sind – sind als Experiment zum Testen des Marktes und der
Produktideen in Phasen entstanden, wo die Firmengrunder selbst abhangig erwerbstatig oder gar als
Arbeitslose registriert waren. Der eigentliche Beginn einer Unternehmerexistenz fallt in ein fliesendes
Kontinuum unterschiedlicher Aktivitaten, die eng zusammenhangen mit einer Beschaftigung als
abhangig Erwerbstatiger oder Perioden der Arbeitsplatzsuche wahrend einer Arbeitslosigkeit.
Mit der Zunahme der Einpersonen-Unternehmen bzw. der Solo-Selbstandigkeit ist ein neues soziales
Phanomen in Bezug auf die Arbeitsmarktstruktur und die Arbeitsteilung entstanden, in dem sich
verschiedene gesellschaftliche Entwicklungslinien uberlappen. Die Frage nach den Formen der SoloSelbstandigkeit
und den Antriebskraften ihrer Entwicklung ist von hohem Forschungsinteresse. Mus die
Solo-Selbstandigkeit hauptsachlich als das Ergebnis von Arbeitsmarktdefiziten betrachtet werden – die
in der Literatur als Push-Faktoren bezeichnet werden – oder reflektiert sie einen neuen Lebensstil und
damit zusammenhangend eine geanderte Form der individuellen Arbeitsgestaltung, der Menschen
berufliche Selbstandigkeit zunehmend attraktiv erscheinen last – sogenannte Pull-Faktoren? Mit
anderen Worten, dient Solo-Selbstandigkeit als Ventil fur den Arbeitsmarktdruck oder ist diese Form
der Selbstandigkeit eher positiv zu betrachten als eine neue Option innerhalb der klassischen
Arbeitsteilung, durch die eine zunehmende Anzahl an Personen ein neues Selbstbewusstsein und eine
stabile Erwerbstatigkeit finden? Die grundlegende Intention des Beitrages ist es, diese spezifische Form
des Grenzbereichs des Unternehmertums zu diskutieren und dies nicht nur in der konventionellen Form
der Unternehmensforschung, sondern innerhalb eines integrierten Ansatzes, der Arbeitsmarktanalysen
sowie die Analysen zur gesellschaftlichen Stratifizierung und sozialer Mobilitat mit umfasst. Der
Beitrag des Arbeitspapiers liegt in der Prasentation einschlagiger Informationen, die zu einer besseren
Fundierung der wissenschaftlichen Debatte uber das Unternehmertum beitragen sollen.

http://edoc.vifapol.de/opus/volltexte/2007/120/pdf/AP_2_2007.pdf

Renaissance of entrepreneurship? Some remarks and empirical evidence for Germany

Der Beitrag beschaftigt sich mit der Frage der beruflichen Selbstandigkeit im Rahmen der strukturellen Veranderungen auf den Arbeitsmarkten. Die Hauptthese lautet, dass es verschiedene Verbindungslinien zwischen der Erwerbskategorie der Selbstandigkeit und den verschiedenen anderen Bereichen der Erwerbstatigkeit gibt. Dabei ist dem Umstand Rechnung zu tragen, dass der Status quo von Selbstandigen prinzipiell von einer hohen Heterogenitat gepragt ist, die eine pauschalisierende Behandlung von vornherein verbietet und vor deren Hintergrund allgemeine Aussagen zu den Selbstandigen ohne Gehalt sind. Vier in ihren Auswirkungen interdependente und problematische Trends sind wahrend der letzten 15 Jahre beobachtbar: (1) Zunahme Soloselbstandigkeit, (2) Unstetigkeit bzw. Mobilitat, (3) Erwerbshybridisierung und (4) Erwerbsprekarisierung. Vorliegende Forschungen uber berufliche Ubergange in Verbindung und entsprechenden Mustern sozialer Mobilitat verweisen auf „multiepisodische Prozesse“ von Berufskarrier...

Selbständigkeit im System der Erwerbstätigkeit

The aim of the paper is to systematise fundamental economic aspects to explain the demand of private households for assisting technologies. The paper shows that previous discussions examined only parts of the problem and ignored relevant determinants. Therefore, some explanation is given for the low development of the market for assisting technologies.

Summary results of this study may lead to the conclusion that the demand is low because: 

willingness to pay is rather small for assisting technologies


all necessities are included in the benefits of the statutory healthcare and long-term care insurance system


products may have the status of luxuries.




However, attempts to answer the question why the demand for assisting technologies is low and why still no market has been developed leads to the conclusion that explanations have to take into account additional factors such as affinity for technology and the willingness to pay.

Uwe Fachinger

Papers

Between Need and Innovative Challenge: Observations on Female Solo-Self-employment in Germany

Ausgabenanalysen für Deutschland und Niedersachsen – Berechnungsergebnisse auf Basis der Einkommens‐ und Verbrauchsstichprobe 2003

Renaissance of entrepreneurship? Some remarks and empirical evidence for Germany

Selbständigkeit im System der Erwerbstätigkeit

The demand for assisting technologies in nursing and medical care: some comments