Imagine each family as a kind of little factory--a multiperson unit
producing meals, health, skills, children, and self-esteem from
market goods and the time, skills, and knowledge of its members.
This is only one of the remarkable concepts explored by Gary Becker
in his landmark work on the family. Becker applies economic theory
to the most sensitive and fateful personal decisions, such as
choosing a spouse or having children. He uses the basic economic
assumptions of maximizing behavior, stable preferences, arid
equilibria in explicit or implicit markets to analyze the
allocation of time to child care as well as to careers, to marriage
and divorce in polygynous as well as monogamous societies, to the
increase and decrease of wealth from one generation to another.
The consideration of the family from this perspective has
profound theoretical and practical implications. For example,
Becker's analysis of assortative mating can be used to study
matching processes generally. Becker extends the powerful tools of
economic analysis to problems once considered the province of the
sociologist, the anthropologist, and the historian. The obligation
of these scholars to take account of his work thus constitutes an
important step in the unification of the social sciences.
"A Treatise on the Family" will have an impact on public policy
as well. Becker shows that social welfare programs have significant
effects on the allocation of resources within families. For
example, social security taxes tend to reduce the amount of
resources children give to their aged parents. The implications of
these findings are obvious and far-reaching.
With the publication of this extraordinary hook, thefamily
moves to the forefront of the research agenda in the social
sciences.
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