Family Economics - History of Family Economics

History of Family Economics

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.

The reproduction of the labor force, namely the way workers reproduce raise children to replace themselves, is a central issue in Marxist Theory. In Capital, Volume I, Marx argues that the amount of labor time that is necessary for the reproduction of workers is equal in value to the income they need to sustain a family which will raise a child to replace the worker. This amount is called necessary labor time. He calls surplus labor time the labor time that workers spend in addition to necessary time. This implies that for Marx the wage that workers need to sustain their families is one of the basic factors that regulates the economy. When he defines necessary labor time, however, Marx means the market labor necessary to earn the income that workers need so that their family can survive. Some connect working class demands for a family wage in late 19th century to Marx's ideas: male workers demanded that their wages be at a level sufficient to eliminate the need of wives and children to do market work. There is nothing on the production occurring within the family in Capital.

Friedrich Engels wrote how on how the economic structure of the family is shaped by the capitalist system. According to Engels the monogamous family, consisting of one man, one woman and children, is something created by the capitalist system. So are adultery and prostitution, institutions that go together with the monogamous family system. Pre-capitalistic forms of marriage discussed by Engels were group marriage and pairing marriage. Engels argued, “with the ponderance of private property over communal property and the interest in its bequeathal, father rights and monogamy gained supremacy.” He expected monogamy to disappear with the demise of capitalism. He wrote that within the family men are like capitalists and women are like the proletariat, and full freedom for women can only be possible if women will be brought "back into public industry," (p. 138) as he expected would happen under socialism. In his view under socialism women would not face the double burden of wage work and unpaid household work, since he expected household tasks to be provided as public services. Other Marxist economists of the late 19th and early 20th century like Bebel, Luxemburg, and Lenin also wrote on the necessity of bringing women back into the public industry.

The marginalist school, developed in the late 19th century, moved the focus of economics further away from family. The focus of early marginalists like Léon Walras, Stanley Jevons, and Alfred Marshall was market transactions, so any work done in the household was not of interest to marginalists. The basic economic unit was either the individual or the household, and when they took the household as the basic unit, they were not interested in how decisions were made within a household.

In the 1920s and 30s economists like Eric Lindahl, Einar Dahlgren, Karin Kock, and Simon Kuznets argued that production within the household was an important part of national production, and without its inclusion GNP cannot be a complete indicator of national production level. During the same period Hazel Kyrk, Margaret Reid and Elizabeth Hoyt tried to develop a new field called consumption economics, trying to bring consumption and production roles in the household within the sphere of economics.

The New Home Economics developed in the 1960's continues to be one of the main approaches in the field of family economics in the 21st Century. The household production functions introduced by Gary Becker in his article “A Theory of Allocation of Time” are used in the analysis of many household decisions. Theodore W. Schultz captured aspects of family that are important for the whole economy and that were emphasized by Becker and Mincer, the founders of the NHE: the production of human capital in the form of investing in children, the maintenance of adults' human capital, the way members of family allocate their time between market and household work, and consumption decisions in the family.“ Contemporary family economics has also been enriched by contributions of Marxists and radical feminists written since the 1070's. While Marxism focuses on how class relationships and capitalism shapes family structure, the focus of radical feminism was on gender, patriarchy and men's domination of women in marriages and households. Marxist-feminists subsequently sought to integrate these two approaches by trying to show how patriarchy and capitalism interact with each other.