Quotations from Chairman Becker

 

In my earlier piece I did a fairly careful analysis of Becker's Treatise on the Family. This page consists of leftover odds and ends, and is keyed to specific quotations from Becker's book.

"The behavior of individuals is coordinated by explicit and implicit markets" (page ix).

"Wage rates are lower for women at least partly because they invest less than men in market human capital, while the productivity of household time is presumably greater for women because they invest more than men in domestic capital." (p. 26)

What are "implicit markets"? In the real world actual markets are wonderful at what they're good at, but Becker is here telling us that actual markets are not really necessary. (And note the "presumably" here).

Throughout the book I ignored Becker's math, mostly on the GIGO principle. It would probably be worth doing to go through Becker's equations one by one to find out how many of the variables represent values (e.g. "domestic productivity") which are not actually quantifiable.

"Of course, most societies forbid the purchase and sale of children, but it is easy to forbid what would be uncommon" (page 29).

The economics profession's proud and almost total ignorance of history and geography has rarely been better displayed than here. Even in today's world, children are bought and sold (and not only for child prostitution). In much of the pre-modern world, for example China, children of poor families were often "adopted" by richer families to supplement their labor force, with a cash payment usually given to the poorer family, and much more repellent cases were seen elsewhere. (Of course, the traditional Chinese family was not much like the contemporary American family, and somewhat resembled a large business firm. In his book Becker seems to assume the American mommy-daddy-kids family at times, even though some of his argument depends on a multi-generation family of the Chinese type. For example, the privacy concerns he touches on on page 33 are not realistic even for many American families -- most real-world families offer little or no privacy).

"Let me emphasize that "deviant" is used in a statistical, and not a pejorative sense". (page 24).

"Deviant behavior would presumably be more common if deviant biology were more common" (page 25).

Had he wished, Becker could have used a neutral term like "exceptional" or "atypical" to make his point. His choice of the term "deviant" was characteristic economist's snark, and his fake explanation that he meant no harm was just taunting. The second expression seems to assume that women who want to work outside the home are usually lesbians, which is not at all true.

"Children from successful families are more likely to be successful themselves by virtue of the additional time spent with them and also because of their superior endowments of culture and genes" (p. 113).

Becker ignores family connections and material inheritance in this introductory passage. Most adults with any real-world experience are aware that these are major factors leading toward  inequality, if not the most important factors of all. Becker left these two factors out here because the whole purpose of his exposition is to minimize them, and the reason he wants to minimize them is because he too suspects that they are the most important factors of all.

 

"This chapter shows that an efficient marriage market usually has positive assortive mating"  p. 66.

It probably would have been a good idea to postpone the application of the efficient markets thesis to the marriage market until after it had been shown to work in regular markets. I am willing to grant, however, that at least the marriage market, unlike the "child market", is a real market.

"Programs providing aid to the mothers of dependent children have reduced the cost of children....the growth of these programs in recent years has contributed heavily to the sharp growth in the the ratio of illegitimate to legitimate birth rates since the 60s. The illegitimate birth rate has remained constant (while the legitimate rate has fallen substantially)...." (page 97).

This is the most interesting fact I found in Becker. But if the rate of illegitimacy is actually stable, it seems that we hardly have an illegitimacy crisis, and it also seems that using economic reasoning to explain illegitimacy rates might be more difficult than Becker seems to think.

"An increase in public resources spent on those children [very poor children] would induce parents concerned with equity to redistribute time and resources away from these children toward other children and themselves...." (page 125; see also page 165).

Becker is talking here specifically about attempts to improve the education of poor children. Like much of economics, his statement is pure speculation (or deduction from basic principles) without any empirical justification, and my guess is that it is almost certainly completely false.

What Becker hopes to do here is give an additional reason why attempts to improve the education of the very poor will be counter-productive or futile. I find what he says here is especially noxious, because Becker does not go on to point out that his reasoning would apply just as well to attempts to send middle-class scholarship students to Ivy League colleges.

"My analysis implies that the mating of like (or unlikes) takes place when such pairings maximize aggregate commodity output over all marriages..." (page 71).

I can't imagine what kind of data would confirm or refute this hypothesis.

"Moreover, families often appoint a 'head', who coordinates expenditures on family capital and other family projects." (page 118)

This almost never happens. Normally, the head of the family is the husband and father, if he is alive and competent. This is the result of thousands of years of custom, which has been written into the law to a degree and which is often enforced, if necessary, with violence. This is the most ridiculous implied contract that I have ever seen alleged.
 

"I have assumed that a household assigns to its members to investments and activities that maximize the household's output of commodities without regard to incentives." (page 32)

This sounds like the traditional extended family. In the US, "the family" is not a multi-generational group including many adults. It consists of parents and children, and there is no "family rationality". Once the children become autonomous adults, the family no longer exists. In most families, only the mother and the father produce anything, unless you count "child-services" such as being cute and shitting. It is true that society and the economy depend on parents' input into child-raising, but I find it hard to think of this as anything but parental altruism and free-riding by "society" and future employers.

Conclusion

Becker's book seems to me to be a mess of ideology, sophistry, and special pleading, salted here and there with misrepresentations of fact. It seems more suited to deception than to enlightenment, and some of Becker's little twists (for example, on the education of the poor, or on "deviant" family members) are so blatant and malicious that I have to regard them as deliberate, culpable violations of the principles of discursive decency.

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Some links


Another piece by Becker

So far I've only skimmed Becker's talk in the link below, but it seems significantly less loony than his book.

http://www.familie-und-gesellschaft.org/downloads/kongrberlin/nachbereitung/BeitragBeckerenglisch8-02.doc

Becker's theory didn't seem to work

The Economic Theory of Fertility Over Three Decades
Warren C. Robinson
Population Studies, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Mar., 1997) , pp. 63-74

Abstract

After a promising start some three decades ago, the application of micro-economic analysis to fertility studies has proved disappointing. It has not led to an increased understanding of fertility decisions nor to the policy insights which had been expected. This paper considers the reasons for this disappointment. It reviews briefly the development of the now dominant version of the economic approach to fertility analysis, the so-called "Chicago Model". It concludes that several basic conceptual and theoretical weaknesses of this approach have led it up a blind alley. The paper concludes with suggestions for new assumptions and approaches which may make the theory more relevant for policy programmes.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0032-4728(199703)51%3A1%3C63%3ATETOFO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W

A critique of Becker on household production

53:30461 Robinson, Warren C. The time cost of children and other household production. Population Studies, Vol. 41, No. 2, Jul 1987. 313-23 pp. London, England. In Eng.
"In this paper the relative time cost of children compared to other types of household tasks, and the relative time cost of producing quantity rather than quality of children is examined....We employ household time-use data from a study of a large metropolitan area in the United States. Our results cast doubt on the notions that: (a) child-services are more time-costly than other household tasks; (b) that quantity of child-services is more time-costly than quality of child-services. Moreover, there appear to be strong complementarities between child-services and other household tasks, and time spent on child care does not seem to act as an obstacle to working outside the home. Finally, we suggest another economic interpretation of the fertility transition centred not on changes in objective factors exogenous to the household, but, instead, on the internal economic power structure of the household itself."
Location: Princeton University Library (SPR).
http://popindex.princeton.edu/browse/v53/n3/g.html

A summary of Robinson

http://f01.middlebury.edu/EC428A/Discussions/Theory/fall2001/Lane.htm

Economic Imperialism

"Economics is not only a science, it is a genuine science. Like the physical sciences, economics uses a methodology that produces refutable implications and test these implications using solid statistical techniques. In particular, economics stresses three factors that distinguish it from other social sciences. Economists use the construct of rational individuals who engage in maximizing behavior. Economic models adhere strictly to the importance of equilibrium as part of any theory. Finally, a focus on efficiency leads economists to ask questions that other social science ignore, These ingredients have allowed economics to invade intellectual territory that previously was deemed to be outside the discipline's realm.

http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/lazear/Personal/PDFs/economic%20imperialism.pdf

Neoclassical economics, despite its incessant metamorphoses, is well defined in terms of the same three meta-axioms on which all neoclassical analyses have been founded since the second quarter of the 19th Century. Moreover, its status within the social sciences, and its capacity to draw research funding and institutional prominence, is explained largely by its success in keeping these three meta-axioms well hidden. The radical lack of pluralism in mainstream economics is, on this account, not to be blamed on illiberally minded practitioners. Rather, it is to be explained in evolutionary terms, as the result of practices which reinforce the profession’s considerable success through diverting attention from the models’ axiomatic foundations to their technical complexity and diverse predictions. A pluralist economics will remain impossible as long as the social economy rewards economists in proportion to their success in keeping their models’ foundations opaque.

[So, the first feature of the ‘body of theory’ we think of as neoclassical is its methodological individualism: the idea that socio-economic explanation must be sought at the level of the individual agent....We label the second feature of neoclassical economics methodological instrumentalism: all behaviour is preference-driven or, more precisely, it is to be understood as a means for maximising preference-satisfaction.....The third feature of neoclassical economics is, on our account, the axiomatic imposition of equilibrium. ]

http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue38/ArnspergerVaroufakis38.htm

 

"Child services" as an analytic tool

Children are a "normal good".

http://wfnetwork.bc.edu/berkeley/papers/7.pdf

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AEA/CSWEP/Fall_1995.pdf

 


 

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