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

Children of Immigration

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

The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration. Michele Lamont New York: Russell Sage Foundation and Harvard University Press, 2000. 391 pp.

The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration.

The COVID-19 pandemic: Impacts on cities and major lessons for urban planning, design, and management

In this article, we consider how, due to a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes, Asians might face a disproportionate mental health impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Analyzing data from the University of...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01419870.2020.1851739

Anti-Asian discrimination and the Asian-white mental health gap during COVID-19

Working life in Canada has changed dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using Labour Force Survey data, we show that gender employment gaps among parents of young children widened considerabl...

https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/cpp.2020-077

COVID-19 and the Gender Employment Gap among Parents of Young Children

Economic, political, and demographic transformations are occurring in East Asian societies, driven by industrialization, urbanization, and closer integration into world markets (Vogel, 1993). These forces have increased women's educational and employment opportunities, but the gendered division of labor remains stubbornly entrenched (Oshio, Nozaki, & Kobayashi, 2013). What may have changed in East Asian societies is women's perceptions of the fairness of unequal divisions of labor and their alternatives to entering and remaining in an unsatisfactory marriage. In Western societies, unequal shares of housework reduce marital satisfaction, and the negative association is stronger in countries with egalitarian gender norms, particularly those with cultural beliefs that spouses should equally share work and family roles (Greenstein, 2009).The diffusion of Western ideals of egalitarian partnerships that has accompanied modernization and globalization suggests that inequalities in the gendered division of labor should also reduce marital satisfaction in East Asian societies (Casterline, 2001; Cherlin, 2004; Wong & Goodwin, 2009). However, the historical-cultural emphasis on familism and gender specialization in East Asian societies (Slote & De Vos, 1998) may function to normalize women's greater and men's lesser time investments in housework, even among egalitarian spouses, and thus remove the gendered division of labor as a source of marital dissatisfaction. This study contributes to the literature on gender and family change by taking a cross-national comparative approach to investigate the independent and joint influences of the gendered division of labor and gender ideology on marital satisfaction among women and men in four East Asian societies.Research on industrialized Western countries indicates that the gendered division of household labor and its consequences for family outcomes vary across national contexts. Women do more housework than men across the contemporary world (Sayer, 2010), but the division of housework is more egalitarian in countries with higher levels of aggregate gender equality, full-time employment of mothers, public child care, and access to paternity leave (Fuwa, 2004;Hook,2010;KnudsenW Greenstein, 1996; Lavee & Katz, 2002; Yodanis, 2010). Associations are contingent on national levels of gender equity because these provide a comparative referent that married women use in forming perceptions of justice about the division of household labor (Greenstein, 2009). National levels of gender equity are associated with public policies and organizational structures of employment and care. These affect women's perceptions about the compatibility of work and family and thus options within and outside of marriage. Structures of employment that influence ability to harmonize work and family continue to vary across East Asian societies (Yu, 2009). Hence, we anticipate that the complex nexus of the division of labor, gender ideology, and marital satisfaction should also vary across East Asian societies.Greenstein (2009) has suggested that in countries with greater gender equity in nonfamily (e.g., economic, educational, political, health) domains, women are less likely to accept micro-level gender inequalities as "fair," which leads to a stronger association between gendered divisions of housework and perceptions of fairness as well as stronger associations between perceptions of fairness and satisfaction with family life. Theoretically, macro-level gender equity is positively associated with gender egalitarianism at home because of three mechanisms (Yu & Lee, 2013). First, women have more opportunities outside of marriage and thus can bargain more effectively in relationships because their "threat point," or ability to leave unsatisfactory relationships, is more credible. …

Division of Labor, Gender Ideology, and Marital Satisfaction in East Asia

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected nearly all the aspects of society since it's onset in early 2020. In addition to infecting and taking the lives of millions of global citizens, the pandemic has fundamentally changed family and work patterns. The pandemic and associated mitigation measures have increased the unemployment rates, amplified health risks for essential workers required to work on-site, and led to unprecedented rates of telecommuting. Additionally, due to school/daycare closures and social distancing, many parents have lost access to institutional and informal childcare support during the COVID-19 crisis. Such losses in childcare support have significantly impacted the paid and unpaid labor of parents, particularly of mothers. In this article, we synthesize recent research on pandemic-related changes to work and family in the United States. Applying an intersectionality lens, we discuss the gendered implications of these changes. Because gender inequality in family and work are connected, COVID-19 has, in many cases, deepened the pre-existing gender inequalities in both realms.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/soc4.12881

Yue Qian

Papers

Anti-Asian discrimination and the Asian-white mental health gap during COVID-19

COVID-19 and the Gender Employment Gap among Parents of Young Children

Division of Labor, Gender Ideology, and Marital Satisfaction in East Asia

The gendered pandemic: The implications of COVID-19 for work and family

Who loses income during the COVID-19 outbreak? Evidence from China