Chapter 56: Economic Analysis of the Family

Steven Horwitz

Economic analysis of the family One of the notable characteristics of economics over the end of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first century is the extension of economic analysis to subject matter that was not traditionally thought of as economic. Books like Freakonomics (Levitt & Dubner, 2005) demonstrate these new applications of economics, and these books' popular success indicates that there is a demand for the use of economics to shed light on a variety of social issues. The origins of this extension of economics to the noneconomic in this fashion are often associated with work at the University of Chicago, in particular the work of 1992 Nobel Laureate Gary Becker. Much of Becker's (1960, 1973, 1974) seminal work in economics was devoted to showing how “the economic way of thinking” could enhance our understanding of a wide variety of social phenomena. One of the first social institutions In ...

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