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

Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave. Pp. viii, 282. £3·50, paperback £1. 1970. (Cambridge University Press.)

The Political Consciousness of Post-Industrialism@@@The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics.

Our future: a Lancet commission on adolescent health and wellbeing

Demographic and health surveys

This article presents a narrative of the unfolding of the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) since the theory was first formulated in 1986. The first part recapitulates the foundations of the theory, and documents the spread of the SDT to the point that it now covers most European populations. Also for Europe, it focuses on the relationship between the SDT and the growing heterogeneity in period fertility levels. It is shown that the current positive relationship between SDT and TFR levels is not a violation of the SDT theory, but the outcome of a "split correlation" with different sub-narratives concerning the onset of fertility postponement and the degree of subsequent recuperation in two parts of Europe. The second part of the article addresses the issue of whether the SDT has spread or is currently spreading in industrialized Asian countries. Evidence gathered for Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan is presented. That evidence pertains to both the macro-level (national trends in postponement of marriage and parenthood, rise of cohabitation) and the micro-level (connections between individual values orientations and postponement of parenthood). Strong similarities are found with SDT patterns in Southern Europe, except for the fact that parenthood is still very rare among Asian cohabiting partners.

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/79230/j.1728-4457.2010.00328.x.pdf?sequence=1

The Unfolding Story of the Second Demographic Transition

This article argues that the demographic changes since the 1950s in the Western world...with respect to family formation and dissolution form a sufficiently cohesive set to warrant a more holistic treatment instead of a variable by variable approach....The central point made in the paper is that alongside the influence of economic factors the recent demographic changes are also closely connected with the rise of manifestations of individual autonomy. Evidence gathered at the micro-level in a variety of countries is discussed within the framework of a theory with multiple causation and a statistical analysis at the macro-level (24 countries) is also presented. The outcome of both is consistent in the demonstration that ideational developments form a non-redundant ingredient in the explanation. Nevertheless the country-level analysis shows that non-negligible national idiosyncrasies remain even after allowing for the combined influences of both economic and cultural factors. (SUMMARY IN ENG AND FRE) (EXCERPT)

[The second demographic transition in Western countries: an interpretation]

The Maslowian theory of the articulation of higher order needs was correlated to the classic economic utility theory and additional ecological theories concerning cultural mobility were considered. The notions of individuation embourgeoisement and civil religion form the foundation of interpretation of changes in Western family formation. The operationalization of these concepts was described and a model of ideational change was proposed. The model of ideational change is cohort-and education-driven; a period-cohort interaction is recognized that may capture the dialectics of idealization and subsequent disenchantment with institutional regulation. The two most salient features of Western ideational change have been the precesses of secularization and individuation. A value scale used exerted a marked impact on the proportion of young women currently cohabiting (or sharing). In Belgium Denmark France and Germany with sharing a minor confounding factor large deviations from the grand mean persisted after control for age and the two variables capturing material circumstance. Agnostics postmaterialists world citizens and nonconformists in familial matters exhibited 7-14% more nonmarital cohabitation at ages 18-29 than the average (23% among women not living with parents). Conversely young women with regular church attendance materialists nationalists and conformists fell 7-17% short of the grand mean. When Ireland United Kingdom the Netherlands which have more sharing or Italy and Spain with unknown proportions of sharing were included the deviations from the overall mean were only slightly attenuated for the religiosity and nonconformism scales. It was documented that cultural changes are not unstructured or simply endogenous. The individuation process has continued to progress despite the degradation of economic opportunities for young adults in Western Europe. The Durkheimian dimension of social integration via the acceptance or refutation of institutional regulation had a direct relationship to changes in family formation family distribution and procreation during the postwar period.

Cultural Dynamics and Economic Theories of Fertility Change

A fertility decline is in essence part of a broader emancipation process. More specifically, the demographic regulatory mechanisms, upheld by the accompanying communal or family authority and exchange patterns, give way to the principle of individual freedom of choice, thereby allowing an extension of the domain of economic rationality to the phenomenon of reproduction. In an earlier article, drawing on the record of Western Europe, I examined social control and the regime of natural fertility. I The first aim of this article is to follow through the evolution of reproduction and changes in family life, drawing on later stages of that same record. The purpose of this exercise is to explore the extent to which current changes in fertility and nuptiality in the region can be viewed as manifestations of a cultural dimension that had already emerged at the time of demographic transition in Europe. Much of the empirical evidence presented here pertains to this issue. The second aim of the article is to place the findings in a broad theoretical framework. Although we shall stress an important sociological component and its historical development, one should not consider the'evidence as incompatible with other subtheories that follow, for instance, the microeconomic approach. In fact, microeconomic analysts will probably find it comforting to see the extension of the domain of economic rationality and of the principle of individual choice traced historically and documented statistically. But, equally central to the philosophy of this article is the argument that the various ways in which persons engage in the calculation of relative advantage reveal more than the algebraic capacities of individuals and their level of perception of opportunities and constraints. More specifically, if persons engage in an evaluation of utilities and disutilities, they operate on the basis of a preference map, and if such a preference structure exists, there must also be a meaninggiving or ideational system that directs it. There is no reason to believe that

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1973316.pdf

A Century of Demographic and Cultural Change in Western Europe: An Exploration of Underlying Dimensions

The core issue in this article is the empirical tracing of the connection between a variety of value orientations and the life course choices concerning living arrangements and family formation. The existence of such a connection is a crucial element in the so-called theory of the Second Demographic Transition (SDT). The underlying model is of a recursive nature and based on two effects: firstly, values-based self-selection of individuals into alternative living arrangement or household types, and secondly, event-based adaptation of values to the newly chosen household situation. Any testing of such a recursive model requires the use of panel data. Failing these, only “footprints” of the two effects can be derived and traced in cross-sectional data. Here, use is made of the latest round of the European Values Surveys of 1999-2000, mainly because no other source has such a large selection of value items. The comparison involves two Iberian countries, three western European ones, and two Scandinavian samples. The profiles of the value orientations are based on 80 items which cover a variety of dimensions (e.g. religiosity, ethics, civil morality, family values, social cohesion, expressive values, gender role orientations, trust in institutions, protest proneness and post-materialism, tolerance for minorities etc.). These are analysed according to eight different household positions based on the transitions to independent living, cohabitation and marriage, parenthood and union dissolution. Multiple Classification Analysis (MCA) is used to control for confounding effects of other relevant covariates (age, gender, education, economic activity and stratification, urbanity). Subsequently, Correspondence Analysis is used to picture the proximities between the 80 value items and the eight household positions. Very similar value profiles according to household position are found for the three sets of countries, despite the fact that the onset of the SDT in Scandinavia precedes that in the Iberian countries by roughly twenty years. Moreover, the profile similarity remains intact when the comparison is extended to an extra group of seven formerly communist countries in central and Eastern Europe. Such pattern robustness is supportive of the contention that the ideational or “cultural” factor is indeed a non-redundant and necessary (but not a sufficient) element in the explanation of the demographic changes of the SDT. Moreover, the profile similarity also points in the direction of the operation of comparable mechanisms of selection and adaptation in the contrasting European settings.

/pdf/value-orientations-and-the-second-demographic-transition-sdt-29e0u7tmq1.pdf

Ronny Lesthaeghe

Papers

The Unfolding Story of the Second Demographic Transition

[The second demographic transition in Western countries: an interpretation]

Cultural Dynamics and Economic Theories of Fertility Change

A Century of Demographic and Cultural Change in Western Europe: An Exploration of Underlying Dimensions

Value Orientations and the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) in Northern, Western and Southern Europe: An Update.