Many activities formerly not in the market are being “marketized,” and women's labor is increasingly in the market. I consider the grounds on which to decide what should and what should not be “in” the market. I distinguish work that is paid from work done under “market norms,” and argue that market values should not have priority in education, childcare, healthcare, and many other activities. I suggest that a feminist ethics of care is more promising than Kantian ethics or utilitarianism (...) for recommending social decisions concerning limits on markets. (shrink)

Contemporary republicanism is characterized by three main ideas: free persons, who are not subject to the arbitrary power of others; free states, which try to protect their citizens from such power without exercising it themselves; and vigilant citizenship, as a means to limit states to their protective role. This book advances an economic model of such republicanism that is ideologically centre-left. It demands an exit-oriented state interventionism, one that would require an activist government to enhance competition and resource exit from (...) dominating relationships within markets of all types, be they marital, labour, or residential. The substantial intervention and redistribution necessitated by such an approach make it leftist, while its tendency to work with rather than against the grain of markets makes it centrist. It is, in short, a contribution to progressive republican political thought, but one that is less social-democratic than market-democratic in character. (shrink)

In this article I undertake an analysis of erotic sexual intercourse - commonly, and more accurately, designated as love-making - in the spirit of Durkheim's social analysis of religion. Thus, based on a phenomenological semiotic analysis of the peculiar things we do and feel in the course of making love, I propose, first, to uncover the implicit `logic' that generates and governs these distinctly sociable doings and sociable feelings. Second, I proceed to suggest that the sameself logic, albeit in an (...) attenuated version, also generates and governs the broad class of `social occasions proper', and that this homology calls for gathering erotic and social occasions under one and the same rubric, which I propose to call the `socio-erotic' (since the term `social' has been denatured through overuse). Third, I conclude with a discussion of how socio-erotic domains fit into a larger world structured and governed mainly by interest-driven and power-driven conflictual fields. (shrink)

Children may be viewed as public goods whereby both parents receive equal genetic benefits yet one parent often invests more heavily than the other. We introduce a microeconomic framework for understanding household investment decisions to address questions concerning conflicts of interest over types and amount of work effort among married men and women. Although gains and costs of marriage may not be spread equally among marriage partners, marriage is still a favorable, efficient outcome under a wide range of conditions. This (...) bioeconomic framework subsumes both cooperative and conflictive views on the sexual division of labor. We test hypotheses concerning marriage markets, assortative mating, and men’s labor motivations among Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of Bolivia and find that: (1) men and women both value work effort in marital partners, (2) marital labor contributions are complementary, (3) work effort is correlated between spouses, (4) total production is correlated with total reproduction, and (5) better hunters have higher fitness gains within marital unions. (shrink)

Parental investment strategies are contingent on parental capacities and ecology. Parental embodied capital may be important in aspiration construction and investments in children’s human capital, which is especially important in urban environments where skills are directly tied to wage income. For Indo-Fijians, rural ecology strongly limits opportunities. Here this limitation is conceptualized as extrinsic risk and immune to reduction through enhanced parental investment. Urban migration is interpreted as a risk reduction strategy, given an expanded urban opportunity structure (lower extrinsic risk). (...) Qualitative and quantitative data from 678 Indo-Fijian children suggest that, contingent on parental capacities, parents migrate in response to their perceptions of decreased opportunities that manifest as high levels of extrinsic risk in rural environments. Parental investment in quality and quantity corresponds to parental perceptions of extrinsic risk, which in turn correspond to migration status, indicating that parental strategies do respond to perceived limits on investment payoffs. (shrink)

Sexual selection processes have received much attention in recent years, attention reflected in interest in human mate preferences. Among these mate preferences are preferences for physical attractiveness. Preferences in and of themselves, however, do not fully explain the nature of the relationships that individuals attain. A tacit negotiation process underlies relationship formation and maintenance. The notion that preferences for physical attractiveness evolved under parasite-driven “good genes” sexual selection leads to predictions about the nature of trade-offs that individuals make between mates’ (...) physical attractiveness and investment potential. These predictions and relevant data are explored, with a primary emphasis on women’s preferences for men’s qualities. In addition, further implications of trade-offs are examined, most notably (a) the impact of environmental variations on the nature of mating and (b) some effects of trade-offs on infidelity and male attempts to control women. (shrink)

Attention to diversity in women's attitudes toward farming and in women's patterns of farm work activity expands our understanding of the linkage between agrarian structure, regional history, and the behavior and values of individual farm women. We combine several disciplinary and methodological approaches to reveal patterns in work and values in a Southern case and then verify the existence of similar patterns in the Midwest. Two divergent conceptions of women's relationship to farm and marital partnership were found in a Georgia (...) study, the agrarian and the industrial, and we explore how they emerged in the context of the political and economic history of the South. We find these marital models are linked today to different patterns of farm work. We then extend the Georgia analysis to a statewide survey of Ohio farm women, where attitudinal diversity is not as marked, due to the stronger agrarian traditions of the Midwest and its distinct political economy. We find similar patterns, however, in Ohio farm women's work and affirm the validity of Carbert's categorization of Rosenfeld's survey items. Attention to diversity in the work patterns, values, and attitudes of farm women highlights that the term “traditional” is a misnomer when applied to Southern women and reinforces the value of multi-disciplinary approaches and regional comparisons. (shrink)

With the discovery of voluminous discordant empirical evidence, maximizing expected utility is rapidly disappearing as the core of the theory of human rationality, and a theory of bounded rationality, embracing both the processes and products of choice, is replacing it. There remains a large task of organizing our picture of economic and social processes and adding the new facts needed to shape the theory in an empirically sound way. It is also urgent that new tools now available for conducting empirical (...) inquiry and constructing models be incorporated in social science graduate education. (shrink)

Coall & Hertwig (C&H) demonstrate the importance of grandparents to children, even in low fertility societies. We suggest policy-makers interested in reproductive timing in such contexts should be alerted to the practical applications of this cooperative breeding framework. The presence or absence of a supportive kin network could help explain why some women begin their reproductive careers or.

On the face of it, the protracted public controversy over abortion in the United States and elsewhere might seem to rest on intractable normative questions inaccessible to economic analysis. But an influential early essay in the now sizable philosophical literature on the subject suggests otherwise. Judith Jarvis Thomson disarmingly inclined toward the view that “the fetus has already become a human person well before birth”,. presumably with all the rights pertaining thereto. She denied, however, that such rights necessarily include use (...) of the mother's womb until birth. To illustrate her point, she compared the mother's situation to that, for example, of an unwilling Good Samaritan with a uniquely suited blood type, who is forced to share a kidney for 9 months with a famous, ailing violinist who needed its use for that duration to recover. Even if the life of a human being was at stake, the assertion of rights for the violinist or the fetus, she argued, would be too degrading for either the Good Samaritan's or the mother's status as a person, where large unwanted sacrifices would be required. Reduced to its economic essentials, the argument is that the mother has property rights to her own body, including the right to expel a “trespasser”. who would die as a consequence. Thus, the antiabortion position is neatly undercut by granting its major premise while denying its conclusion. (shrink)

This article reexamines the rational choice or economic approach to human studies. Its adherents claim that its extension beyond its original domain to all human behavior can finally lead to integration of the human studies, especially social theory, and thus their elevation from what they see as a chaotic state. Specifically, they propose grounding human studies on the premise that humans are rational egoists or self-interested utility maximizers. Although this premise has been the conceptual foundation of orthodox economic theory, it (...) has been questioned, and even in part discredited in its heterodox versions. This reexamination casts serious doubts on such claims. (shrink)

This article exploits the unique consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak to examine whether time constraints drive the unequal division of unpaid labor between dual-earner couples in Israel. Using the first wave of longitudinal household data that was collected in Israel since the outbreak of the pandemic, we focused on 325 dual-earner couples who stayed employed during the first lockdown. By employing OLS regressions, we examined the association between changes in employment hours and changes in unpaid labor for partnered men (...) and women. Strong evidence was found for a gendered translation of the time constraints mechanism: A decrease in hours of paid work is related to an increase in hours of care for children among men and women, but time devoted to housework increased only among women. We conclude that time constraints that resulted from the dramatic effect of the first lockdown on paid and unpaid work in Israel did not significantly change the gender division of unpaid housework but did change the distribution of childcare. The theoretical implications of this conclusion for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Postgenderism is an extrapolation of ways that technology is eroding the biological, psychological and social role of gender, and an argument for why the erosion of binary gender will be liberatory. Postgenderists argue that gender is an arbitrary and unnecessary limitation on human potential, and foresee the elimination of involuntary biological and psychological gendering in the human species through the application of neurotechnology, biotechnology and reproductive technologies. Postgenderists contend that dyadic gender roles and sexual dimorphisms are generally to the detriment (...) of individuals and society. Assisted reproduction will make it possible for individuals of any sex to reproduce in any combinations they choose, with or without "mothers" and "fathers," and artificial wombs will make biological wombs unnecessary for reproduction. Greater biological fluidity and psychological androgyny will allow future persons to explore both masculine and feminine aspects of personality. Postgenderists do not call for the end of all gender traits, or universal androgyny, but rather that those traits become a matter of choice. Bodies and personalities in our postgender future will no longer be constrained and circumscribed by gendered traits, but enriched by their use in the palette of diverse self-expression. (shrink)

Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski argue in recent work that “semiotic” or “symbolic” objections to markets are unsuccessful. I counter-argue that there are indeed some semiotic limits on markets and that anti-commodification theorists are not merely expressing disgust when they disapprove of markets in certain goods on those grounds. One central argument is that, contrary to what Brennan and Jaworski claim, semiotic arguments against markets do not depend fundamentally on meanings that prevail about markets. Rather, they depend on the meanings (...) that attach to various goods, meanings that give us moral bases on which to make judgments about their prospective commodification. (shrink)

The sexual revolution that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s is one of the most profound social changes during the second half of the twentieth century in America. Before the revolution, there existed a norm proscribing premarital sex (PS norm); premarital sex was not accepted. After the sexual revolution, the PS norm no longer existed; premarital sex became accepted. In the literature on how premarital sex became accepted, little attention is given to the institutional change that transpired—the (...) collapse of a sexual norm. This study specifies one micro-mechanism of this social change. Specifically, adopting methodological individualism and the prisoner's dilemma game, I develop a theory that explains how a technological innovation for contraception triggered a change in individuals' perception of premarital sex, which led to their behavioral change. As a result, premarital sex became accepted, and the norm proscribing premarital sex collapsed. I use General Social Survey data to test the hypothesized micro-mechanism of the institutional change. The empirical analysis supports the hypothesis derived from the theory. Based on the above analyses, I discuss two alternative explanations and the issue of teenage pregnancy. (shrink)

The joint effort by the U.S. government and the political elite of Puerto Rico to industrialize the island created increased demand for female labor and a decline in the number of jobs traditionally held by men. The authors examine whether women's labor force participation in the formal sector responds to improving opportunities for women, declining opportunities for men, or the household's changing opportunity structures. Specifically, they examine a woman's return to work after the birth of her first child as the (...) initial point of conflict between productive and reproductive work. The data used in these analyses are from the 1982 Puerto Rican Fertility and Family Planning Assessment, an islandwide, representative sample of never-married and ever-married women between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine. The authors estimate a series of nested logistic regression models to evaluate the influence of occupational expansion or contraction on the timing of return to work after the first birth. Their findings offer selective support for the idea that women's lives are affected primarily by the occurrence of growing labor demand for women's labor. (shrink)

This article presents a theoretical framework that views interpersonal power as interdependent with broader structures of gender and class inequalities. In contrast to oversimplified, gender-neutral or gender-static approaches, this approach illuminates the ways that structures of inequality are expressed in ideological hegemonies, which enhance, legitimate, and mystify the interpersonal power of privileged men relative to lower-status men and women in general. The discussion centers on how the relational construction of ascendant and subordinated masculinities provide men with different modes of interpersonal (...) power that, when exercised, construct and reaffirm interclass male dominance. Examples of how the construction of femininity can undermine women's interpersonal power and implications for other forms of masculinities and femininities are discussed. Examples are drawn from an analysis of conjugal power in the accounts of remarried individuals' first and second marriages to illustrate the main points of this perspective. (shrink)

Reasons husbands and wives give for why wives work and the structural factors related to reasons given are examined along with the impact of these reasons on husbands' and wives' personal well-being and quality of marital relationships. Although financial and other structural factors are important in understanding why wives work, interpretations using gender and family roles also explain the findings. Working for financial reasons is related to neither wives' nor husbands' personal well-being and quality of marital relationships; however, working for (...) reasons that bring rewards to the wife alone has positive consequences for women and mixed results for men. These findings point to the need to assess both structural and interpretive explanations when examining the impact of work on the family. (shrink)

Modern societies have reconciled the dilemma between self-interest and caring for others by dividing women and men into different moral categories. Women have been expected to seek personal development by caring for others, while men care for others by sharing the rewards of their independent work achievements. Changes in work and family life have undermined this framework but have failed to offer a clear avenue for creating new resolutions. Instead, contradictory social changes have produced new moral dilemmas. Women must now (...) seek economic self-sufficiency even as they continue to bear responsibility for the care of others. Men can reject the obligation to provide for others, but they face new pressures to become more involved fathers and partners. Facing these dilemmas, young women and men must develop innovative moral strategies to renegotiate work-family conflicts and transform traditional views of gender, but persisting institutional obstacles thwart their emerging aspirations to balance personal autonomy with caring for others. To overcome these obstacles, we need to create more humane, less gendered theoretical and social frameworks for understanding and apportioning moral obligation. (shrink)

For most of human history children have been a byproduct of sex rather than a conscious choice by parents to create people with traits that they care about. As our understanding of genetics advances along with our ability to control reproduction and manipulate genes, prospective parents have stronger moral reasons to consider how their choices are likely to affect their children, and how their children are likely to affect other people. With the advent of cheap and effective contraception, and the (...) emergence of new technologies for in vitro fertilization, embryo selection, and genetic engineering, it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify rolling the genetic dice by having children without thinking about the traits they will have. It is time to face up to the awesome responsibilities that accompany our reproductive choices. (shrink)

This article asks whether firms should contribute to the costs of procreation and parenthood. We explore two sets of arguments. First, we ask what the principle of fair play – central in parental justice debates – implies. We argue that if one defends a pro-sharing view, firms are required to shoulder part of the costs of procreation and parenthood. Second, we turn to the principle of fair equality of opportunity. We argue that compensating firms for costs they incur because their (...) employees decide to procreate or parent may undermine some of the incentives leading to (statistical) discrimination in the workplace. (shrink)

The idea that simplicity matters in science is as old as science itself, with the much cited example of Ockham's Razor, 'entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem': entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. A problem with Ockham's razor is that nearly everybody seems to accept it, but few are able to define its exact meaning and to make it operational in a non-arbitrary way. Using a multidisciplinary perspective including philosophers, mathematicians, econometricians and economists, this 2002 monograph examines simplicity (...) by asking six questions: what is meant by simplicity? How is simplicity measured? Is there an optimum trade-off between simplicity and goodness-of-fit? What is the relation between simplicity and empirical modelling? What is the relation between simplicity and prediction? What is the connection between simplicity and convenience? The book concludes with reflections on simplicity by Nobel Laureates in Economics. (shrink)

Relatives play an important role in human reproduction according to evolutionary theories of reproductive behavior, but previous empirical studies show large differences in the effects of kin on fertility outcomes. In our paper we examine the effect of co-resident kin and non-kin on the length of birth intervals over the reproductive life course of Dutch women born between 1842 and 1920. We estimate Cox proportional hazard models for parity progression based on the presence of kin and non-kin in the household (...) while controlling for a large number of individual and community-level characteristics. We find that couples living with their brothers experienced shorter birth intervals whereas couples residing with a widowed father had relatively longer birth intervals. The effects of these types of kin on reproduction were most pronounced up to the birth of the fifth child, but not thereafter. We found no effect for mothers or other types of kin. (shrink)

The fundamental postulate of sociobiology is that individuals exploit favorable environments to increase their genetic representation in the next generation. The data on fertility differentials among contemporary humans are not cotvietent with this postulate. Given the importance ofHomo sapiensas an animal species in the natural world today, these data constitute particularly challenging and interesting problem for both human sociobiology and sociobiology as a whole.The first part of this paper reviews the evidence showing an inverse relationship between reproductive fitness and “endowment” (...) in contemporary, urbanized societies. It is shown that a positive relationship is observed only for those cohorts who bore their children during a unique period of rising fertility, 1935–1960, and that these cohorts are most often cited by sociobiologists as supporting the central postulate of sociobiology. Cohorts preceding and following these show the characteristic inverse relationship between endowment and fertility. The second section reviews the existing so-ciobiological models of this inverse relationship, namely, those of Barkow, Burley, and Irons, as well as more informal responses among sociobiologists to the persistent violation of sociobiology's central postulate, such as those of Alexander and Dawkins. The third section asks whether the goals of sociobiology, given the violation of its fundamental postulate by contemporary human societies, might not be better thought of as applied rather than descriptive, with respect to these societies. A proper answer to this question begins with the measurement of the pace and direction of natural selection within modern human populations, as compared to other sources of change. The vast preponderance of the shifts in human trait distributions, including the IQ distribution, appears to be due to environmental rather than genetic change. However, there remains the question of just how elastic these distributions are in the absence of reinforcing genetic change. (shrink)

A central thesis of this paper is that understanding the nature of child maltreatment is so complex that no one disciplinary specialty is likely to be sufficient for the task. Although life history theory is the guiding principle for our analysis, we argue that an evolutionary explanation adds precision by incorporating empirical findings originating from the fields of anthropology; clinical, developmental, and social psychology; and sociology. Although evolutionary accounts of child maltreatment have been largely limited to the role of the (...) coefficient of relatedness, the prospective reproductive value of a child, and the residual reproductive potential of parents, a case is made for expanding this basic application. An explanatory model is presented that describes how ecological conditions as well as parental and child traits interact to influence the degree of parental investment. As shown in the model, these various “marker variables” alter parental perceptions of the benefits and costs associated with child care and promote low-investment parenting, which leads to disrupted family management practices and to a downward-spiraling, self-perpetuating system of coercive family interaction, increased parental rejection of the child, and even lower parental investment. Child maltreatment is the ultimate outcome of this downward trajectory of family relations. (shrink)

Resurgent interest incommodities is linked to recent attempts toovercome the constraints posed by the binariesof economy/culture and production/consumption.Commodities and commodification represent acontentious convergence of economic, social,cultural, political, and moral concerns. Thisessay develops a conceptual framework forunderstanding this interconnectedness byexamining the relationship between commoditiesand our discourse, practices, and assumptionsabout food. We argue that the movement of afood artifact between local/global andglobal/local contexts is mediated by dynamicsof power and resistance that represent contestsof meaning regarding the criteria of that artifact's exchangeability. We apply (...) thisframework to the case of the tortilla, tracingits social life through an historical accountof its transformation from the staple food ofthe Mayan and Aztec people to its introductionas a fast food component of the diets of21st century Americans. This exampledemonstrates that food provides a powerful lensthrough which to trace and illustrate theinterconnectedness between material andsymbolic exchanges around the world that arecommonly associated with globalization. (shrink)

This response outlines more reasons why we need the integrative framework of grandparental investments and intergenerational transfers that we advocated in the target article. We discusses obstacles that stand in the way of such a framework and of a better understanding of the effects of grandparenting in the developed world. We highlight new research directions that have emerged from the commentaries, and we end by discussing some of the things in our target article about which we may have been wrong.

The target article emphasizes the need to identify psychological mechanisms underlying grandparental investment, particularly in low-risk family contexts. We extend this approach by addressing the changing demands of balancing work and family in low-risk families. Taking a lifespan psychological perspective, we identify additional motivators and potential benefits of grandparental investment for grandparents themselves and for subsequent generations.

Trusting in someone's cooperation is often connected with the danger of being exploited. So it is important that signals are exchanged which make it probable enough that the potential partner is reliable. Such signals must be too expensive for partners who are planning to abuse the trust they are given but cheap enough for those who wish to initiate a long-term cooperation. In a game theoretical model, it is shown that such signals could consist of presents given before the partnership (...) starts. (edited). (shrink)

This paper deals with causal analysis in the social sciences. We first present a conceptual framework according to which causal analysis is based on a rationale of variation and invariance, and not only on regularity. We then develop a formal framework for causal analysis by means of structural modelling. Within this framework we approach causality in terms of exogeneity in a structural conditional model based which is based on (i) congruence with background knowledge, (ii) invariance under a large variety of (...) environmental changes, and (iii) model fit. We also tackle the issue of confounding and show how latent confounders can play havoc with exogeneity. This framework avoids making untestable metaphysical claims about causal relations and yet remains useful for cognitive and action-oriented goals. (shrink)

Is society an organic whole with each of its many components working together like the organs in a body? Like organisms, societies are composed of many parts which seem to work together enhance their survival. Different people fulfill different, necessary role—subsistence, reproduction, coordination, and defense. Regular exchange of matter and energy guarantees that each component has the resources it needs. Norms, laws and customs regulate virtually every aspect of social interaction, who may marry who, how disputes are resolved, and how (...) verbs should be conjugated. Ritual and religion provide comfort to the sick and fearful, maintain a feeling of solidarity and belonging, and serve to preserve and transmit knowledge through time. Even the simplest human societies seem like complex machines designed for growth and survival. (shrink)

Rational analysis (Anderson 1990, 1991a) is an empiricalprogram of attempting to explain why the cognitive system isadaptive, with respect to its goals and the structure of itsenvironment. We argue that rational analysis has two importantimplications for philosophical debate concerning rationality. First,rational analysis provides a model for the relationship betweenformal principles of rationality (such as probability or decisiontheory) and everyday rationality, in the sense of successfulthought and action in daily life. Second, applying the program ofrational analysis to research on human reasoning (...) leads to a radicalreinterpretation of empirical results which are typically viewed asdemonstrating human irrationality. (shrink)

The roles of women and of feminine identity have been historically and traditionally constructed around motherhood. However, recent years have seen a growing trend among women to remain childless/ childfree. Drawing on interviews with 25 voluntarily childless women, this article considers the extent to which this trend results from the appeal or pull of the perceived advantages of a childfree lifestyle as well as the ways childfree women might represent a more fundamental and radical rejection of motherhood and the activities (...) associated with it. The article concludes by considering how to recast understandings of feminine identity away from a mother-centered focus. (shrink)

We use tools from evolutionary game theory to examine how power might influence the cultural evolution of inequitable norms between discernible groups in a population of otherwise identical individuals. Similar extant models always assume that power is homogeneous across a social group. As such, these models fail to capture situations where individuals who are not themselves disempowered nonetheless end up disadvantaged in bargaining scenarios by dint of their social group membership. Thus, we assume that there is heterogeneity in the groups (...) in that some individuals are more powerful than others. Our model shows that even when most individuals in two discernible sub-groups are relevantly identical, powerful individuals can affect the social outcomes for their entire group; this results in power by association for their in-group and a bargaining disadvantage for their out-group. In addition, we observe scenarios like those described where individuals who are more powerful will get less in a bargaining scenario because a convention has emerged disadvantaging their social group. (shrink)

The behavioral sciences have flourished by studying how traditional and/or rational behavior has been governed throughout most of human history by relatively well-informed individual and social learning. In the online age, however, social phenomena can occur with unprecedented scale and unpredictability, and individuals have access to social connections never before possible. Similarly, behavioral scientists now have access to “big data” sets – those from Twitter and Facebook, for example – that did not exist a few years ago. Studies of human (...) dynamics based on these data sets are novel and exciting but, if not placed in context, can foster the misconception that mass-scale online behavior is all we need to understand, for example, how humans make decisions. To overcome that misconception, we draw on the field of discrete-choice theory to create a multiscale comparative “map” that, like a principal-components representation, captures the essence of decision making along two axes: aneast–westdimension that represents the degree to which an agent makes a decision independently versus one that is socially influenced, and anorth–south dimensionthat represents the degree to which there is transparency in the payoffs and risks associated with the decisions agents make. We divide the map into quadrants, each of which features a signature behavioral pattern. When taken together, the map and its signatures provide an easily understood empirical framework for evaluating how modern collective behavior may be changing in the digital age, including whether behavior is becoming more individualistic, as people seek out exactly what they want, or more social, as people become more inextricably linked, even “herdlike,” in their decision making. We believe the map will lead to many new testable hypotheses concerning human behavior as well as to similar applications throughout the social sciences. (shrink)

Using data from Bangladesh, this paper examines how the birth order of a child influences parental decisions to place children in one of four activities: 'study only', 'study and work', 'neither work nor study' and 'work only'. The results of the multinomial logit model show that being a first-born child increases the probability of work as the prime activity, or at least a combination of school and work, rather than schooling only. The results confirm that later-born children are more likely (...) to be in school than their earlier-born counterparts. (shrink)

In modern Indian political discourse the custom of dowry is often represented as the cause of serious social problems, including the neglect of daughters, sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, and the harassment, abuse, and murder of brides. Attempts to deal with these problems through legislative prohibition of dowry, however, have resulted in virtually no diminution of either dowry or violence against women. In contrast, radically different interpretations of dowry can be found in the literatures of structural-functionalist anthropology, economics, and human behavioral (...) ecology which muster wide-ranging forms of qualitative and quantitative evidence to support functional models of dowry as a form of inheritance or investment in daughters and/or their children. This paper argues that a functionalist perspective on dowry could lead to improved dowry policy, and that an approach based in human behavioral ecology (HBE) is uniquely suited to this task. After reviewing the relevant literature on dowry in South Asia, I discuss current dowry legislation and its limitations. I then develop a behavioral ecology model of Indian dowry and test it with quantitative and qualitative data. I conclude that if dowry legislation is to achieve broad support or bring about effective social change, it must address and support the positive motivations for and effects of dowry and take a targeted approach to dowry violence, which is not uniformly distributed across regions, castes, or social classes. (shrink)

Women’s fertility is the focus of most demographic analyses, for in most mammals, and in many preindustrial societies, variance in male fertility, while an interesting biological phenomenon, is irrelevant. Yet in monogamous societies, the reproductive ecology of men, as well as that of women, is important is creating reproductive patterns. In nineteenth-century Sweden, the focus of this study, male reproductive ecology responded to resource conditions: richer men had more children than poorer men. Men’s fertility also interacted with local and historical (...) factors in complex ways to have significant impact on population growth. As a result, “the” demographic transition was local, and locally reversible, in Sweden. Results cannot be simply translated from nineteenth-century studies to current attempts to promote fertility decline, because today, male and female resource-fertility curves differ in shape, not only in magnitude. When we translate studies of fertility decline, it is important to study individual fertility and to discern whether, in any particular case, male and female patterns are similar. (shrink)

Feminist economics draws increasing attention from professional mainstream economists. In this paper, we discuss methodological issues, some theoretical developments – notably on the household – and issues of economic policy. We point to parallels between feminist economics and institutional economics, and argue that these relations might be strengthened to the benefit of both.