Families
Becker's research on human social interactions has had many implications for the family including implications for marriage, divorce, fertility, and social security. Becker argued that such decisions are made in a marginal-cost and marginal-benefit framework and that marriage markets affect allocation into couples and individual well-being. He first analyzed fertility, starting in 1960. His research examined the impact of higher real wages in increasing the value of time and therefore the cost of home production such as childrearing. As women increase investment in human capital and enter the workforce, the opportunity cost of childcare rises. Additionally, the increased rate of return to education raises the desire to provide children with formal and costly education. Coupled together, the impact is to lower fertility rates. His theory of marriage was published in 1973 and 1974. Among its many insights are that (1) sex ratios (the ratio of men to women in marriage markets) are positively related with wives' relative access to consumption in marriages and (2) men with higher incomes are more likely to be polygamous. He then published a paper on divorce in 1977, with his students Robert T. Michael and Elizabeth Landes in which it is hypothesized that divorces are more likely when there are unexpected changes in income. Many of these insights on fertility, marriage, and divorce were included in Becker's Treatise on the Family A Treatise on the Family, first published in 1981 by Harvard University Press. According to Google Scholar it is one of the most cited books in economics.
A more controversial issue was Becker's conclusion that parents often act altruistically towards selfish children by highly investing in a child in an effort to indirectly save for old age. Becker believed that the rate of return from investing in children was often greater than normal retirement savings. However, parents can not know for sure that the child will take care of them. Since they cannot legally bind a child to care for them, they often resort to manipulation through instilling a sense of "guilt, obligation, duty and filial love that indirectly, but still very effectively... commits children to helping them out." Becker said that social security can cause families to be less interdependent by removing the motivation of parents to use altruistic behaviors in motivating their children to care for them.
Read more about this topic: Gary Becker
Famous quotes containing the word families:
“Families need families. Parents need to be parented. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles are back in fashion because they are necessary. Stresses on many families are out of proportion to anything two parents can handle.”
—T. Berry Brazelton (20th century)
“Families have always been in flux and often in crisis; they have never lived up to nostalgic notions about “the way things used to be.” But that doesn’t mean the malaise and anxiety people feel about modern families are delusions, that everything would be fine if we would only realize that the past was not all it’s cracked up to be. . . . Even if things were not always right in families of the past, it seems clear that some things have newly gone wrong.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren’t dying. They’re merging into big conglomerates.”
—Erma Bombeck (b. 1927)