Family economics

Family economics applies basic economic concepts such as production, division of labor, distribution, and decision making to the study of the family. Using economic analysis it tries to explain outcomes unique to family—such as marriage, the decision to have children, fertility, polygamy, time devoted to domestic production, and dowry payments.

The family, although recognized as fundamental from Adam Smith onward, received little systematic treatment in economics before the 1960s. Important exceptions are Thomas Robert Malthus' model of population growth and Friedrich Engels' pioneering work on the structure of family, the latter being often mentioned in Marxist and feminist economics. Since the 1960s, family economics has developed within mainstream economics, propelled by the new home economics started by Gary Becker, Jacob Mincer, and their students. Standard themes include:

Several surveys, treatises, and handbooks are available on the subject.

Early economists were mostly interested in how much individuals contribute to social production, which translated into how much labor they supply in the labor market. Production within the household was not a subject that received systematic treatment by early economists.

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith alludes to the importance of the family in his chapter on Wages. Smith wrote: “But though in disputes with their workmen, masters must generally have the advantage, there is, however, a certain rate below which it seems impossible to reduce, for any considerable time, the ordinary wages even of the lowest species of labour....A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.” Accordingly, the wage received by the worker must be high enough to support the family in order to ensure the inter-generational reproduction of the working class. Malthus added to this analysis in his theory of population growth, where he argued that when wages are high laboring families tend to have more children, causing increase in population and reduction in wages.

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