The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

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

We investigate whether income inequality affects subsequent growth in a cross-country sample for 1965-90, using the models of Barro (1997), Bleaney and Nishiyama (2002) and Sachs and Warner (1997), with negative results. We then investigate the evolution of income inequality over the same period and its correlation with growth. The dominating feature is inequality convergence across countries. This convergence has been significantly faster amongst developed countries. Growth does not appear to influence the evolution of inequality over time. Outline

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/81822/1/02-28.pdf

Economic growth and income inequality

Statistical Analysis with Missing Data

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/5/110/206.full.pdf

The american psychological association.

The Chinese household registration system (hukou), which divides the population into “agricultural” and “nonagricultural” sectors, may be the most important determinant of differential privileges in state socialist China, determining access to good jobs, education for one’s children, housing, health care, and even the right to move to a city. Transforming one’s hukou status from rural to urban is a central aspect of upward social mobility. Using data from a 1996 national probability sample, we show that education and membership in the Chinese Communist Party are the main determinants of such mobility.

/pdf/the-household-registration-system-and-social-stratification-51s46iacz8.pdf

The Household Registration System and Social Stratification in China: 1955-1996

Data from a 1996 national probability sample of Chinese men is used to analyze the effect of family background on occupational mobility in contemporary China, with particular attention to the rural‐urban institutional divide. China has an unusually high degree of mobility into agriculture and also, apparently, unusual “openness” in the current urban population. Both patterns are explained by China’s distinctive population registration system, which simultaneously fails to protect rural‐origin men from downward mobility and permits only the best educated to attain urban registration status, resulting in severe sample selection bias in previous studies restricted to the urban population. New light is shed on the relationships between the socialist state and social fluidity and between inequality and mobility.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/518905

Inequality and Equality under Chinese Socialism: The Hukou System and Intergenerational Occupational Mobility

Previous work on the market transition in reform-era China has missed the direct link between individuals' labour market history and individuals' labour market outcome. A typology of workers is developed based on individuals' labour market histories, and a model of selective mobility of workers from the state sector to the market sector is offered as an explanation for higher earnings returns to education in the market sector. Analysis of data from an urban survey in China reveals that commonly observed higher earnings returns to education in the market sector are limited only to recent market entrants, and that early market entrants resemble state workers in both their level of earnings and returns to education. These results challenge the prevailing wisdom that education is necessarily more highly rewarded in the market sector. Thus it is concluded that higher returns to education in the market sector should not be construed as being caused by marketization per se, and instead that the sorting process of workers in labour markets helps explain the sectoral differentials.

Does the market pay off? Earnings returns to education in Urban China

This chapter examines the trend in school enrollment and transitions to senior high school and to college in China for selected young cohorts since the 1990s, based on the analyses of the sample data from population censuses in 1990 and 2000 and the mini-census in 2005. We pay particular attention to educational inequality based on gender and the household registration system (hukou) in the context of educational expansion. Results show a substantial increase in educational opportunities over time at all levels. In particular, women have gained relatively more; gender inequality has decreased over time, and the gap in college enrollments was even reversed to favor women in 2005. However, rural–urban inequality was enlarged in the 1990s. The educational expansion has mainly benefited females and urban residents.

Changes in educational inequality in China, 1990-2005: Evidence from the population census data

Over the last four decades, as China has transitioned from a socialist centralized economy to a productivity-and-efficiency-oriented market economy, so too have the country’s public and private spheres become increasingly differentiated. Although others attribute changing gender inequality to the market transition, we draw from Chinese feminist critical analyses and propose a theoretical framework regarding how the two-sphere separation in contemporary China, embedded in how gender equality was organized in the socialist time, has been driven by the state and is further justified by changing gender ideologies. We review the existing literature and identify gaps in research on how women’s disadvantages in the public and private spheres—in the labor market and within the family—mutually reinforce each other in post-reform urban China. We also discuss how the dynamics of, and interactions between, the two spheres are justified by a changing gender ideology. Finally, by exploring gender inequality in the process of the two-sphere separation in a transitional context, we make an important contribution to the general sociological and gender literature.

Xiaogang Wu

Papers

The Household Registration System and Social Stratification in China: 1955-1996

Inequality and Equality under Chinese Socialism: The Hukou System and Intergenerational Occupational Mobility

Does the market pay off? Earnings returns to education in Urban China

Changes in educational inequality in China, 1990-2005: Evidence from the population census data

Unequal Care, Unequal Work: Toward a more Comprehensive Understanding of Gender Inequality in Post-Reform Urban China