Wout Ultee

Bio: Wout Ultee is an academic researcher from Radboud University Nijmegen. The author has contributed to research in topics: Occupational prestige & Unemployment. The author has an hindex of 23, co-authored 134 publications receiving 2424 citations. Previous affiliations of Wout Ultee include University of Amsterdam & Utrecht University.

Klasse en stemgedrag in westerse industriële landen, 1945-1990 : verklaringen gesystematiseerd en getoetst.

Abstract: Significant differences are found among countries in their levels of class voting. The Scandinavian countries had the highest and Canada and the United States the lowest level of class voting. Furthermore, from the 1950s in almost all countries a decline in the level of class voting occured. In this paper, from a limited number of individual assumption several hypotheses wre deduced each purpoting to explain the differences among and declining trends within countries. Test of these hypotheses, applying multilevel techniques, revealed that differences among countries can best be explained by the amount of religious-ethnic diversity among its inhabitants and by the union density within countries. Furthermore, a rise in the percentage union members, especially among the nonmanual classes, accelerated the decline in the level of class voting in some countries

Een schoolloopbaanmodel met IQ-variabelen voor zonen én vaders

Abstract: Omitting IQ variables from a path model for educational career may result in overestimation of environmental effects. To investigate this phenomenon, questionnaire data on fathers' occupational status, fathers' & sons' educational level, & fathers' & sons' IQ were obtained from Dutch military recruits & their fathers (N = 2,847). The results show that including the sons' IQ in a model for the educational career improves the model by avoiding the overestimation of environmental effects; however, adding the fathers' IQ to the model makes no difference. In Intelligentsie of leerprestatie? (Intelligence or Educational Achievement?), J. Dronkers & J. L. Peschar argue that more attention should be given to environmental influences, particularly within the school, since the quality of education can bring about some change in IQ between first grade & high school graduation. 2 Tables, 8 Figures, 1 Appendix, 14 References. Modified HA

Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks

Abstract: Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localize...

A Treatise on the Family

Abstract: 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. …