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Economic Aspects of the Family as Educatorby Peter R. Moock - 1974 It is possible to combine all the individual and group consumption that goes on in the family unit into one "family consumption package" and, using economic theories designed for analyzing individual decisions, to make valid and useful statements about family activities. It may seem strange to some that economists feel they have
something useful to say about the way in which family members
relate to one another in the home. Concerned as they are with
market transactions and the performance of industry, economists may
appear too crass and heartless to deal with such fine and loving
relationships. However, this view of the economist's proper role
and area of concern is comparatively recent in origin.
Economics began as the study of household activities. In fact, the
word economics stems from the Greek oeconomia,
meaning household management. Aristotle used a completely different
word, chrematis-tike, to refer to the pursuit of gain in the
market place, an activity which he quite
despised.1 Still, it is true that the economics developed since the
eighteenth century has been particularly unsuited to the analysis
of intrafamily activities, and it is only recently that extensions
of the so-called classical and neoclassical traditions have enabled
contemporary economists to tread this unfamiliar ground. There is
the fundamental tenet of received economic theory, that the utility
of each individual depends wholly on the goods and services that he
or she consumes and not at all on what anyone else consumes. As the
principle underlying Adam Smith's notion of the "invisible hand,"
this premise dates at least from the eighteenth century. However,
its careful formalization and virtual sanctification are the works
of the more recent neoclassical economists. The assumption of utility independence has proved highly useful
in analyzing a wide variety of market-related problems. Those who
criticize the concept of "economic man" as being unrealistic
or extreme, even when it allows of useful predictions of
group behavior, would seem to have missed the point of positive
inquiry.2 Nevertheless, economists have been reluctant to extend the model
of market behavior to cover the interaction among family
members. The attitude of a wife toward her husband or of a father
toward his child is thought to be essentially different from the
egoism that characterizes "the consumer" in microeconomic
theory. As a means of skirting the issue, economic pedagogy does not
distinguish between "the consumer" and "the household." The
two are treated as synonyms. "When economists speak of the
consumer, they are in fact referring to the group of individuals
composing the household."3 Whereas in the past this terminological convention amounted to
an admission by economists that internal family behavior was
outside their purview, some economists have now begun to advance
the opposite view. It is argued that for many purposes, which
include "nonmarket" decisions about family size, family location,
education of children, and participation of different family
members in the labor force, the family group does behave as if it
were one person maximizing a single utility
function. Making this point, Robert Willis writes: The family exists as an institution because, given altruism and
the nonmarket mechanisms by which it is able to allocate
commodities and welfare among its members, it has both the
incentive and the capacity to resolve allocative problems
involving public goods, externalities, and the like that in
impersonal markets inevitably lead to market imperfections. The
capacity of the family to resolve these problems efficiently
provides a basis for a positive theory of family behavior,
because, given efficient allocation, the family will tend to
respond systematically to changes in the position or shape of the
constraints it faces.4 In other words, it is possible to combine all the individual and
group consumption that goes on in the family unit into one "family
consumption package" and, using economic theories designed for
analyzing individual decisions, to make valid and useful statements
about family activities. At the same time, however, to extend the neoclassical notion of
the household as a consistent decision-making unit, so that it
covers realms of behavior previously considered to be
"noneconomic," as Willis and a number of his colleagues at the
National Bureau of Economic Research have done, is not to
illuminate the process by which group decisions are reached.
Willis alludes to the efficacy of "altruism" within the family, and
a few economists, prompted by family examples and also by
observations of social welfare programs and private philanthropy,
have begun to examine the implications of "love" and "charity" for
the theory of consumer choice. One school posits a "family welfare
function," grafted on the separate utility functions of the
different family members.5 An alternative approach
extends the traditional theory of choice by making the consumption
of one person an argument in the utility function of another: "...
if M cares about F, M's utility would depend on the commodity
consumption of F as well as on his own."6 Yet all existing versions of consumer theory may imply
competition between any two individuals by attributing a unique
utility function to each individual. If, in the extreme case of
altruism, M and F are both saints, such that each would devote all
of their combined resources to increasing the other's consumption
level, it is not possible for both to be satisfied. They are
competing to serve one another just as, in the simpler model,
consumers compete to serve themselves. Thus the incorporation of
altruism into utility theory does not tell us whose preferences
among the members of a family are to be satisfied. When economists
treat the household as a single decision-making unit, they are
relying at this point on explanations from outside their
discipline—on what Willis calls "the nonmarket mechanisms."
We might imagine, as does J. Kenneth Galbraith in a recent article,
a dominant husband/father imposing his will on the rest of the
family,7 or picture a more democratic form of family
politics. II
We come now to a subtle but crucial distinction between
traditional microeconomic theory and the theory upon which the
economic analysis of most intrafamily behavior must
rest.8 It has to do with the objects of human choice.
The neoclassical model suggests that the consumer derives
utility from the goods and services purchased in the market place
out of money income. The critical "discovery," in what Gary S.
Becker, an important progenitor and proponent, and others have
called "the new home economics," is that market purchases seldom
(if ever) contribute directly to satisfaction. They are, instead,
inputs used in the production of primary items of satisfaction,
which Becker calls "basic commodities."9 When an
individual buys a book, what he desires and ultimately consumes is
reading, or home decoration, or the appearance of intellectualism,
or some combination of these. The book is a means to an end or, in
the economist's language, an input in the production of some
desired output or commodity. However, the enjoyment of most (if not all) commodities requires
that the consumer use his own time in addition to market
purchases. Reading is a relatively time-intensive consumption
activity, and what is more, there is little the individual can do
to increase his output of reading without increasing
proportionately his input of time. (He might enroll first in a
speed-reading course, but this is an investment that presumably
alters the productivity of his time spent in this activity.)
In the production of other commodities there is a wide choice of
production techniques, which is to say that it is possible to
substitute increasing amounts of purchased inputs for decreasing
amounts of family time inputs. To enjoy a gourmet meal, it is
possible, at one extreme, to purchase it at La Caravelle, using up
only as much of one's own time as is necessary to ingest the food
(without violating the sensibilities of the chef or one's
fellow patrons) or, at the other extreme, to spend the entire day
at the produce markets and in the kitchen before sitting down to
dine en famille. The full cost of any commodity includes the cost of the
purchased inputs plus the cost of the time used in production. The
cost of the purchased inputs is, in principle, easy to figure,
since each item was priced in the market. The cost of the time
input presents more of a problem, since unlike the time spent in
market employment, there is no explicit wage attached to the time
spent in home employment. In evaluating the time a person
spends, say, cleaning the house, an economist asks the
question: What could have been produced in the best alternative use
of this time? Assuming that market employment represents the most
productive alternative, then the individual's potential market
earnings serve as an indicator of what it costs the family to have
that person cleaning the house. The foregone earnings (and this is
equally true of the price of any purchased good) serve as a measure
of what the family gives up.10 There are two variables especially that economists always have
liked to examine with regard to their effects on consumption.
One is income, the other, price. Their effects are no less
interesting in the new analysis of commodity consumption than
they were in the older analysis of the demand for goods and
services. We would expect that, other things being equal, a
family with more income will be able to consume more of all
commodities than a family with less income. At the very least, it
will be able to afford more purchased inputs and, in this manner,
increase the quantity of commodities produced. A family's decision
with regard to the consumption of a particular commodity as income
changes is an indicator of how highly it regards this commodity in
relation to other commodities. Given the level of family income, we would expect that the
amount of a commodity a family consumes will vary as the
price of the commodity varies. For example, when the price of
gasoline increases, the family can afford less
transportation. Similarly, if a wife's time becomes more
valuable in the market, we might expect the family to choose to
have fewer home-cooked gourmet meals and to substitute other inputs
(husband's time or children's time or time-saving machines)
for her time in the production of the washing and the waxing. In
other words, a family in which time inputs are costly would tend to
favor commodities and production techniques that are relatively
goods-intensive, whereas a family in which time inputs are cheap,
meaning that the market opportunities are limited, would tend to
favor commodities and production techniques that use relatively
large amounts of family time. III
To review our discussion thus far, we have seen that the
economic theory formulated by the great economic thinkers of
the past two hundred years was quite unsuited to the analysis of
internal family behavior. However, recent developments, which
extend rather than supplant the traditional theory, give the
economist a firm foot in the family door. The family is
viewed as a cohesive and consistent decision-making unit,
which allocates the time of different family members in combination
with purchased articles in order to produce desired
commodities. One such desired commodity is the raising of children. In fact,
the basic human desire to raise one's own children helps to explain
the ubiquity of the institution of marriage in different societies
throughout the world.11 Progeny are valued for the
psychic income (utility) that they can be expected to yield over
many years. As such, they may be called "consumer
durables."12 In poorer societies especially, children
are valued as well for their productive services in the home, in
the family fields, and for the money income that, it is hoped, they
will earn and remit to their parents. As such, children qualify as
"producer durables." In many countries, children are the sole
source of old-age security, and where due to market
imperfections the rural-urban income differential is great
for individuals of the same skill level, so that there is keen
competition for urban jobs, parents often feel compelled to rear
large families, "counting each child as another chance in the
national lottery for [urban] wage
employment."13 In analyzing parental behavior with regard to the raising of
children, we must recognize the inextricable link that exists
between a couple's fertility decision (the number of children
born) and what might be called in aggregative fashion "its
nurturing decision" (the level of household resources expended per
child). In other words, the single commodity, raising children, has
both a quantity dimension and a quality dimension. The same is true
of most other objects of human consumption. In the words of Becker:
"For nearly all other consumer durables, such as cars, houses, or
refrigerators, families purchase more units as well as better
quality units at higher income levels, with the quantity income
elasticity usually being small compared to the quality
elasticity."14 This insight helps to explain the
(positive but) very weak correlation observed cross-sectionally and
over time between number of children and family wealth, other
things, such as wife's market wage and birth-control knowledge,
held constant (the simple correlation usually is found
to be negative, that is, poorer families have more children). Thus
with children as with automobiles, the response to a higher level
of income is frequently to trade in the family Chevrolet for a
Buick rather than to purchase a second Chevrolet. As our discussion moves from the general theoretical framework
that enables today's economist to analyze family behavior broadly
defined to focusing on the family's educative role—the
particular component of family behavior specified in our
title—we necessarily lose sight of the many interrelated
behavioral components. Most researchers who concentrate on
the allocation of family (or societal) resources to the
intellectual and physical development of children simply
accept the number of children as "given," that is, as an
exogenous variable. Clearly, it is not "a given" in the broader
context of family (societal) decision-making. Economists, no
less than other social scientists, are willing to engage in partial
analysis of this kind but, possessing a general theoretical
framework, are able to recognize it as such. IV
Having isolated the commodity, education, from the rest of the
family's wants, what is the economist able to say about it? Like
all other household commodities, education is produced by combining
market inputs and family time. The public school movement in the
United States, which shifted the burden of educational
responsibility for children over the age of five from the family to
the state, can be described in economic terms as a substitution of
market inputs for parents' time (not for children's time, of
which American schools have been unnecessarily wasteful, treating
it as a "free good").15 A similar, though in most cases
less complete, process of substitution has occurred
historically with respect to a number of other household
commodities, for example, the preparation of meals in which
families have relied increasingly on precleaned, precut, precooked
food inputs in order to save on family members' time. However, for
children under the age of five, despite the growing availability of
nursery schools and day-care facilities, education remains largely
a home-produced commodity, consuming large quantities of
family time. The economic analysis of home production is not easily separated
from the study of female labor force participation, a topic that
Jacob Mincer at Columbia University pioneered in the context of
time allocation theory three years before the appearance of
Becker's celebrated article in which the approach was given a
generalized formulation.16 In general, married women
spend more time at non-market activities, especially at child care,
and less time in the labor force than their husbands do. Contrary
to the rhetoric of militant feminism, the explanation is not simply
one of cultural inertia, although if one digs deeply enough,
ascribed sex roles can probably be found to be at the root of the
phenomenon. At the simplest level of economic decision-making, a
family allocates members' time to different activities according to
their relative productivity levels in each of the activities. If,
perhaps as the result of more schooling and on-the-job experience,
the husband's market wage rate is higher than the wife's, then
there is incentive for the family to devote more of the husband's
time to market employment or, put differently, more of the wife's
time to home employment, even if the wife is no more productive
than the husband in home employment. The cultural bias is
reflected, not perhaps in the lower wage rate nor in the family
decision that follows from it, but in the fact that the woman
has had less (marketable) human capital invested in her from the
start. As indicated in a recent article by Mincer and Polachek,
women spend less time in the labor force because they earn less,
and they earn less because they spend less time in the labor force
(and in school).17 Ceteris paribus, women with more education spend more
time in the labor force (and less time in the home) than women with
less education. The most thorough study to date of the relationship
between these two variables is the Columbia University doctoral
dissertation of Arleen Leibowitz.18 Leibowitz
supports the explanation "that education raises productivity
in the labor market more than the productivity of time spent in
home production, so that the 'cost' of not being in the labor force
rises [with educational attainment]"19 However, her most
interesting observation taken from United States census data is an
exception to the above rule. The exception occurs between the ages
of twenty-five and forty. During this time, the years when young
children are in the home, better educated women spend no more time
in the labor force than other women (and during these years all
women spend less time in the labor force than immediately before or
after, a gradual increase in labor force participation occurring
when women are in their thirties and the children are growing up).
Moreover, in another study using microlevel time-allocation data,
Leibowitz demonstrates that women with more education actually
spend more time at child care (and so do their husbands) than women
with less education, despite the greater cost of their time as
measured by foregone market earnings.20 Apparently, child care differs from other home activities in one
or more ways that are discernible in economic analysis. To verify
the differences, Leibowitz runs separate regressions with which to
compare the determinants of the wife's time (minutes over two days)
devoted to four different categories of household work: meal
preparation, laundering, physical care, and "other care" of
children. The final category is of particular interest in the
present context, as it was defined by the Cornell researchers who
gathered the data, for a sample of some 1,300 families, as
"all activities related to the social and educational development
of family members, such as: helping with lessons, reading to
children, taking children to social and educational
functions."21 Leibowitz finds weak support for the hypothesis that the amount
of child care "purchased" (produced by combining market purchases
and family time) is responsive to changes in income,
everything else (such as the price of purchased inputs and the cost
of time) remaining the same.22 Leibowitz uses two
proxies for family income, husband's education and the number of
rooms per capita. The regression coefficients for these variables
in the equation for wife's time supplied to "other care" of
children are positive but not significant. Husband's education is taken as a proxy for income because
education is known to raise one's productivity in the market, that
is, one's wage. The reader should note that a wife's education in
the context of this research is not a proxy for family income but
rather an indicator of the "price" of child care. That is, the cost
of the wife's time devoted to this activity is her potential market
wage, which the family gives up. If education affects productivity
in home production as well as in market production, then the net
effect of a wife's education on the use of her time is not
predictable ex ante. The greater market productivity and the
greater home productivity pull her in two directions. In Leibowitz'
study, the net effect is found to be in the direction of child
care, but the coefficient is not significant. The most striking of Leibowitz' conclusions concerns differences
in the availability of effective substitutes for a woman's
time at child care as opposed to substitutes for her time in other
household work. As would be expected, the time given to laundering
is much reduced by the presence of laundering machines in the
house. In contrast, one is hard pressed to think of machines that
can substitute for a mother's time in the production of child care,
especially in the production of social and educational
development.23 Leibowitz analyzes as well the human substitutes for the
mother's time. Whereas the "husband's time in meal preparation is a
substitute (albeit a highly imperfect one!) for the wife's
time,"24 it appears that his time and her time are
complementary in child care. Controlling for the family's expressed
taste in child care, as well as for other variables identified a
priori as determinants of the wife's time input, the analysis
shows that ten minutes of a husband's time given to child care is
accompanied by an additional three to four minutes of a wife's
time. As for the time inputs of other persons, namely, older children,
grandmothers, and sitters, these are found to substitute minimally
for a wife's time, but only in the case of the less educated
subsample of families when the sample is divided by wife's
education into those with some college and those with none.
Apparently, education increases the productivity of time spent at
child care, and the more educated women find these other persons
unacceptable substitutes in this activity. In a study that predates
Leibowitz' and is less conclusive for our purposes, Hill and
Stafford find that the presence of both a thirteen-seventeen
year-old child and a three-four year-old child, holding
constant the number of children in these and all other age
categories, reduces the mother's time spent in household work for
all (of three) SES groups defined in the study.25
However, because household work is not broken down into its many
productive categories, there is no way of telling whether the time
of the older child is substituting for the mother's time in child
care or only in other activities. Thus their finding is not
necessarily inconsistent with Leibowitz', that college-educated
women are generally unwilling to substitute the time of less
educated persons for their own time in caring for young
children. In another study, Hill and Stafford happen upon a fascinating
pattern in the time allocated to preschoolers according to sex of
child and education of parents. Using a sample of families surveyed
by the Institute of Social Research of the University of Michigan,
they find, holding father's education constant, that women with at
least some college education spend more time with their preschool
daughters than with their preschool sons, whereas the reverse is
true for women who have never attended college. In contrast,
father's education appears to have no differential impact on the
amount of family time devoted to boys and girls. They conclude that
father's education, as a proxy for family income, is important in
determining the level at which child care in general is produced
within the home, whereas mother's education serves to influence the
allocation of time inputs to child care by
sex.26 The preceding observations on home education, emanating mostly
from the research of Arleen Leibowitz at Brown University and Frank
Stafford and Russell Hill at the University of Michigan, have to do
with the determinants of the inputs of family time allocated
to this production activity. The remainder of our discussion
will look at what economists have been able to say about the
effects of home education on school achievement and on
future earnings. V
Most noteworthy about the emergent economic analysis of home
education are the implications for social mobility in this country.
We have noted in our summary of Leibowitz' work that the more
years of schooling a woman has completed, the more time, on
average, she spends with her children. This is true, in part,
because the better educated woman is likely to come from wealthier
parents and to marry a (potentially) wealthier man than is her less
educated counterpart and, thus, can afford to devote more of her
time to child care. Holding family wealth constant, however, we
have seen that the more educated woman tends still to spend more
time with her children, especially engaged in activities related to
their educational and social development. We may infer that another
reason for her giving more of her time to child care is that she is
"better," that is, more productive, at it. Thus using the mother's
education as an indicator of socioeconomic status, we may conclude
that a child in a high SES group receives on average not only a
greater input of the mother's time but a greater benefit per unit
of mother's time than does a child in a low SES
group. As if the greater quantity and quality of the mother's time were
not enough of an advantage, there is evidence of complementarity
between mother's time and father's time in child care, with the
result that the high SES child is likely to receive a greater input
of the father's time as well. With home education, we may conclude
that it never rains but it pours. There is no shortage of evidence assembled by sociologists and
economists alike demonstrating that there is significant covariance
between the education of one or both parents and a child's success
in school or in later life.27 Until recently,
however, there was little understanding of the process by
which parents' education contributed to the child's success.
There are at least three hypotheses that explain the observed
relationship. The first is the heritability argument, which states
that the higher educational attainment of the parents and the
greater success of the child are both the results of superior
genetic traits that characterize the family. The second is a
sociological explanation, that the more educated parents are able
to exercise their greater social influence to the benefit of their
children. The third, an economic hypothesis, asserts that the more
educated parents are successful in endowing their children with
greater knowledge and more skills, that is, with a larger
investment in early human capital development. We have already seen evidence that more educated parents spend
more time per child at child care. However, to determine that this
expenditure represents an investment in the child's development and
not simply parental consumption, it is necessary to develop a model
wherein the success of the child in school and in later life is
expressed as a function of the quantity and quality of parental
time inputs. Unfortunately, the required longitudinal data, which
should span the period from birth to at least the age of
thirty or forty years, are not readily available. The best economic
study to date along these lines is provided again by
Leibowitz.28 In this study, Leibowitz must resort to a pair of dummy
variables as the best available indicator of the quantity of
time given to home instruction.29 To indicate the
quality of time inputs, she uses the schooling levels
reached by mother and father. Although the sample is an exceedingly
rarefied group, consisting entirely of men and women whose
childhood IQ scores exceeded 140, which stratum represents the top
1 percent of the intelligence distribution, the conclusions are
suggestive, nevertheless, and call for additional research in this
area, as representative longitudinal data become
available.30 The conclusions flow from measures of the partial effects of
home education on three indicators of offspring success: IQ at a
point in grade school, final schooling level (reported some thirty
years later), and income (reported at three points in later life,
corresponding roughly to ages thirty, forty, and fifty years). The
model is a recursive system, wherein IQ is postulated to affect
schooling attainment, and both IQ and schooling attainment are
posited as contributors to income. The sample is partitioned by sex
in all of the regressions. Although the model explains only a small
proportion (less than 20 percent) of the variance in any of the
three success indicators, it does underscore the importance of home
educational investments, at least as these affect male
children. The quantity of parental time inputs was found to be
significantly related to a son's IQ score. The same was true of the
mother's education, but not of the father's, which suggests
that the relationship is one primarily of human capital
production instead of heredity. Whereas the quantity
of home educational inputs, as measured, was not found to affect
schooling attainment, the quality of time inputs showed a
significant impact on the final schooling level attained by both
male and female children. Finally, although early home investments
had no direct effect on income in later life, their
indirect effect cannot be ignored in light of the strong,
positive relationship between income and schooling, attested to in
a host of recent economic studies31 and reconfirmed by
Leibowitz. Thus we find initial support for the proposition that the
intergenerational transfer of socioeconomic status occurs, at least
in part, through a process of investment in the early human capital
of children. More educated parents spend more time with their
children, and this expenditure "pays off" in the form of greater
aptitude in school, which leads ultimately to greater economic
success. Hill and Stafford find that religious affiliation, which,
like parents' education, is a favorite choice of statisticians as
an efficient "predictor" of income, is also closely related to
preschool time inputs.32 The policy implications of these findings concern ways of
compensating for a paucity of home inputs, so that children of
equal natural ability but coming from different socioeconomic
backgrounds have the same opportunity for economic success. There
are just two alternatives, broadly defined, that come to mind. The
first is to provide compensatory inputs to children from deprived
backgrounds once they enter the formal schooling system. This is
the strategy that has received more attention in the United States,
partly because the public role in the schools was already
established and partly because the nature of social "deprivation"
was not fully understood. However, by the time a child is
five-years old, it may be too late to begin the process of
equalization, which is to say that the costs of achieving this goal
may be greater than society is willing to bear. The second alternative is to provide additional inputs, both
material and human, for a poor child from the day of birth (and
before birth in the form of prenatal care). The preschool time
inputs of parents can be supplemented by the time inputs of other
adults, presumably the high quality time inputs of specially
trained adults. Parents who have been deprived of adequate human
capital investment themselves from birth cannot impart the
cognitive skills necessary for the scholastic and economic success
of their children. There may be, however, another dimension of quality, which is
not the increased productivity that education imparts but
rather the instinctive concern of parents for their own child. If
this, too, contributes to a child's development, as we suspect it
must, then it is imperative that public policy not undermine the
family unit. We can imagine no institution that could substitute
satisfactorily for the family on a full-time basis in the nurturing
of children during the critical stages of infancy and early
childhood. The ideal educational policy, in the opinion of this writer,
would provide convenient access to remedial educational
facilities for impoverished parents as well as their children.
However, mere access to educational facilities does not insure
their use. There can be little appreciation for the long-range
benefits of education on the part of families struggling for
survival from day to day. If an enriched environment is indicated
for a child's healthy development, then in the opinion of this
writer, the enrichment should begin in the home. Presumably, a way
to achieve the more equal provision of early education is to
achieve, as a first step, the more equal distribution of income
among families. ENDNOTES 1 See Robert L. Heilbroner. The Economic
Problem. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968, p.
34. 2 See Milton Friedman, "The Methodology of Positive
Economics," in Milton Friedman, ed. Essays in Positive
Economics. Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1953. 3 Richard G. Lipsey and Peter O. Steiner.
Economics, 3rd ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1972, p.
52. 4 Robert J. Willis, "A New Approach to the Economic
Theory of Fertility," in Theodore W. Schultz, ed. New Economic
Approaches to Fertility, supplement to Journal of Political
Economy, Vol. 81, No. 2, Part 2, March/April 1973, p.
S19. 5 See Paul A. Samuelson, "Social Indifference
Curves," Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 70, February
1956, pp. 1-22. 6 Gary S. Becker, "A Theory of Marriage: Part II,"
in Theodore W. Schultz. Marriage, Family Human Capital, and
Fertility," supplement to Journal of Political Economy,
Vol. 82, No. 2, Part 2, March/April 1974, p. S12. 7 John Kenneth Galbraith, "The Economics of the
American Housewife," The Atlantic Monthly, August 1973, pp.
78-83. 8 I am grateful to Charles Skoro for textual and
organizational suggestions that contribute enormously to the
clarity of the following section. 9 Gary S. Becker, "A Theory of the Allocation of
Time," The Economic Journal, Vol. 75, No. 299, September
1965, pp. 493-517. 10 Naturally, the potential wage may differ, not
only for different family members, but also for any one family
member at different times of the day (9 to 5 o'clock versus off
hours) and days of the week (weekdays versus weekends). Becker, "A
Theory of the Allocation of Time," op. cit. Because of this
and other serious problems of measurement, housework is not even
included in the official statistics of national production;
moreover, the neoclassical model distinguishes only between "work"
(that is, market time) and "leisure." Condemned to Doll's House
status by these conventions of traditional economics are
millions of American housewives who devote none of their time to
market employment. 11 Gary S. Becker, "A Theory of Marriage: Part
I," Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 81, No. 4, July/
August 1973, pp. 813-846. 12 Becker was the first to place children in this
category, defined by the social accountants: Gary S. Becker, "An
Economic Analysis of Fertility Behavior," in Universities-National
Bureau Conference Series 11. Demographic and Economic
Change in Developed Countries. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1960. For a demographer's angry reaction, see
Judith Blake, "Are Babies Consumer Durables? A Critique of the
Economic Theory of Reproductive Motivation," Population
Studies, Vol. 22, March 1968, pp. 5-25. 13 Peter R. Moock, "Managerial Ability in Small-Farm
Production: An Analysis of Maize Yields in the Vihiga Division of
Kenya," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Teachers College, Columbia
University, New York, 1973, p. 30. 14 Becker, "An Economic Analysis of Fertility
Behavior," op. cit., p. 212. See also Gary S. Becker and H.
Gregg Lewis, "On the Interaction Between Quantity and Quality of
Children," in Schultz, New Economic Approaches to Fertility, op.
cit., pp. S279-S288. 15 Harold Noah points out to me that the public
school movement was simply the culmination of a long and gradual
process of substitution. Earlier examples of substitutes for
parents' time include private tutors, dame schools, church schools,
and private commercial and charity schools. See Lawrence A. Cremin.
American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783, Vol.
1. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. 16 Jacob Mincer, "Labor Force Participation of
Married Women: A Study of Labor Supply," in Universities-National
Bureau Conference Series 14. Aspects of Labor Economics.
Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1962; Becker, "A
Theory of the Allocation of Time," op. cit. 17 Jacob Mincer and Solomon Polachek, "Family
Investments in Human Capital: Earnings of Women," in Schultz,
Marriage, Family Human Capital, and Fertility, op. cit., pp.
S76-S108. 18 Arleen Leibowitz, "Women's Allocation of Time to
Market and Non-Market Activities: Differences by Education,"
unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, New York,
1972. 19 Arleen Leibowitz, "Education and the Allocation
of Women's Time," unpublished paper, 1973, p. 3. (A version of this
paper is scheduled for publication in F. Thomas Juster, ed.
Education, Income and Human Behavior. New York: National
Bureau of Economic Research, 1974.) 20 Arleen Leibowitz, "Education and Home
Production," American Economic Review, Vol. 64, No. 2, May
1974, pp. 243-250. 21 Ibid., Table 1, p.
245. 22 In technical language, Leibowitz finds that there
is positive income elasticity of demand for child care. Her
hypothesis was that this elasticity would be greater than those for
other household activities, but the data are not conclusive on this
point. 23 Television, given Sesame Street and other
out-of-the-ordinary programming, may be one. However, many
purchased inputs, such as books and educational toys, in order to
have their intended impact may require actually an additional input
of time. That is, they may complement mother's time, rather than
substitute for it. 24 Leibowitz, "Education and Home Production,"
op. cit., p. 246. The regression shows that ten minutes of
the husband's time in meal preparation reduces the wife's time by
only five minutes; hence Leibowitz' conclusion that the
substitution is far from perfect. 25 C. Russell Hill and Frank P. Stafford, "The
Allocation of Time to Children and Educational Opportunity," paper
presented at the Econometric Society Meetings, New Orleans,
December 1971. (A version of this paper is scheduled for application in
the Journal of Human Resources, 1974.) 26 C. Russell Hill and Frank P. Stafford, "Time
Inputs to Children," in James N. Morgan, ed. 5000 American
Families—Patterns of Economic Progress, Vol. 2. Ann
Arbor, Mich.: Institute of Social Research,
1974. 27 See, for example, James S. Coleman et al.
Equality of Educational Opportunity. Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1966; Samuel Bowles, "Schooling and
Inequality from Generation to Generation," in Theodore W. Schultz,
ed. Investment in Education: The Equity-Efficiency Quandary,
supplement to Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 80, No. 3,
Part 2, May/ June 1972, pp. S219-S251. 28 Arleen Leibowitz,"Home Investments in Children,"
in Schultz, Marriage, Family Human Capital, and Fertility,
op. cit., pp. S111-S131. 29 A dummy variable is one with just two values, a
"yes" value, which by convention is given the numerical equivalent
of one, and a "no" value, given the equivalent of zero. In this
study, the first variable is defined by the parents' having spent a
"considerable number of hours, but chiefly reading, telling
stories, and writing," the second variable by there having been "an
appreciable amount of instruction along particular lines."
Individuals who score one on the second variable may be said to
have had much home education; those who score one on the first
variable to have had an intermediate amount of home education;
those who score one on neither variable, to have had "no
instruction, other than the usual amount of reading and telling
stories." Ibid., p. S116. 30 The data were collected from 1921 under the
direction of Lewis M. Terman, a Stanford University
psychologist. 31 See, for example, Giora Hanoch, "An Economic Analysis of
Earnings and Schooling," Journal of Human Resources, Vol. 2,
No. 3, Summer 1967, pp. 310-329; Daniel C. Rogers, "Private Rates
of Return to Education in the U.S.: A Case Study," Yale Economic
Essays, Spring 1969, pp. 89-134. 32 Hill and Stafford, "Time Inputs to Children,"
op. cit.
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