Rational Economic Families? Economics, the Family and the Economy

Abstract

Does rational economic man have a family life? It is difficult to imagine this ‘…lightning calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness…’ (Veblen, 1919: 73–4) wearing slippers, playing with his children or taking out the garbage. Yet the family is an important economic institution enabling consumers to produce their own utility or satisfaction, using as inputs both purchased and homemade goods and constrained by time. Its organization is crucial to understanding market exchange. To take a pertinent example, the unequal division of domestic responsibilities has long been recognized as disadvantaging women in paid work. Women come to the labour market burdened down with domestic baggage. This is the common sense which Becker, doyen of the New Household Economics, has dressed up in formal mathematics. It is a common sense which can be readily supported by references to married women’s earnings in comparison with single women’s earnings, or, more dramatically, with reference to mothers’ earnings in comparison with the earnings of women who have no children (Polachek, 1975; Joshi, 1987; Blau and Khan, 1992; Joshi, Paci and Waldfogel, 1998). Not surprisingly, therefore, feminist economics has as one of its core demands that economic analysis should take account of the social division of labour as a whole including domestic labour (Gardiner, 1997).