Knowledge that Transforms

For the last twenty-five years, our society has scrutinized relationships between women and men to an unprecedented degree. In this discussion-at once a positive description of behavior and a normative evaluation of family life-neoclassical economics has contributed important insights concerning the connection between the labor market and the family. However, the neoclassical inquiry has proceeded in remarkable isolation from interdisciplinary and popular debates which have focused on the issue of power relations between men and women-a stance which ultimately restricts the explanatory scope of the analysis. The invisibility of power is particularly characteristic of the metaphor for marriage (Gary Becker, 1981; myself, 1987; Nancy Folbre, 1986). The exclusive focus on trade reduces social power to mere purchasing power, which is exercised over technical resources or consumption goods, not people. The transaction cost analysis of the family (Robert Pollak, 1985, and Paula England and George Farkas, 1986) has a richer conception of power relations between family members who are locked in bilateral monopolies, but here power seems to be little more than a phenomenon endemic to longterm personal relationships. In this paper I advance two different propositions concerning the mechanisms and consequences of power between men and women, and use them to consider some concrete questions about the household. First, the mechanisms of power include collective action (a point argued in other contexts by Douglass North, 1981; Amartya Sen, 1977; Albert Hirschman, 1985; Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, 1986; and Heidi Hartmann, 1976). Second, the consequences of power include the social construction of gender. A discriminatory economic system produces men and women whose socially differentiated capacities for performing and enjoying various types of work are much more distinct than their innate endowments. In other words, preferences and productive abilities are endogenous. (In this paper, I borrow from the work of Hirschman, Sen, Gintis, 1972, and many feminist authors such as Alison Jaggar, 1983, to explore the endogeneity of preferences.) I use two questions to motivate consideration of these claims. The first concerns the informal marriage contract: why has men's participation in household labor and childcare been so slow to change as women's market income has increased? Time-budget studies generally show that men's household labor is not very responsive to women's market labor. At most, men took on about two more hours of household responsibilities per week in the 1970's when women's wage labor increased dramatically (Ellen Fried and Susan Settergren, 1986; C. Russell Hill and Frank Stafford, 1980; Hartmann, 1981). The second question concerns the formal marriage contract: why are there so many retDiscussants: Gary S. Becker, University of Chicago; Paula England, University of Texas-Dallas.

authors assess the baby boom generations impact on relative wages in the United States in the year 2020. Time series data for the period 1955-1984 from the MIT-Penn-SSRC data bank are used. An econometric model of the demand for workers in eight age-sex categories is estimated. The simulation results indicate that wages of prime-age workers will not deteriorate in relation to older workers as a result of the aging of the baby boom cohort. Conclusions for teens cannot be drawn. general result does not hold for women however. Prime-age women are predicted to lose in comparison with older workers and with men increasing rather than reducing wage differentials by sex ceteris paribus. (EXCERPT)

Positive models of public-utility regulation should capture personal incentives of regulators. A regulatory objective function is specified by appea l to standard human concerns coupled with politics and processes pecu liar to public-utility regulation. Constraints a rational regulator w ould impose on the firm are thereby derived, and connections between regulatory objectives and regulatory rules illuminated. Results inclu de theoretical rationales for "rate-of-return" regulation in a worl d of certainty, and a largely neglected type of "rate-of-return" re gulation under (symmetric) uncertainty. Other forms of regulation sho uld also be explicable in terms of personal motives of human regulato rs. Copyright 1988 by American Economic Association.

The output of the considerable effort expended on economic education in the schools of the United States is, of course, the resulting contribution to the students' degree of understanding of the workings of our economy and their pertinent reasoning ability. A comprehensive survey questioning both teachers and students, whose first phase has now been completed, permits a more extensive description of what has been achieved, of the means that have been used in the process and of the resources available for the purpose. Perhaps even more important, it makes possible an empirical analysis of the relationship between the inputs and the outputs-the methods and resources used and the achievements of the students. This article describes some of the main results obtained from a first analysis of these data. Among the major results to date that emerge from this study are the following conclusions: 1) Students who receive formal training in economics at the senior level in high school, consisting of a minimum of three hours per week, understand some economic topics quite well but have major gaps in their understanding of others. 2) Students share with their teachers many of the same goals for studying economics, but students believe that these goals are less important than teachers believe them to be. 3) Most economics students have not had any experience in studying economics prior to the senior level course. 4) Economics students believe that economics helps them to think more systematically about some kinds of issues they face, but not others. 5) Student attitudes toward their economics courses vary considerably, with 23 percent describing themselves as liking economics a lot, 42 percent as liking it a little, 16 percent as unsure, 7 percent as disliking it a little, and 6 percent as disliking it a lot. 6) Senior students receiving formal training in economics constitute a fairly representative group in terms of Scholastic Aptitude Test scores but not in terms of the educational achievements of their parents. 7) Teachers giving instruction in economics at the high school level vary widely in the amount of their college training in economics and in their experience in teaching it. 8) The gender and ethnic backgrounds of economics teachers differ from those of economics students. 9) The topics in economics most frequently included by economics teachers in their courses were supply and demand, how market and prices work, and monetary and fiscal policy. Topics most neglected include balance of payments, how to interpret economic data, and measurement concepts. 10) The teachers felt that the instructional materials most helpful to them were newspapers, textbooks, and graphs and charts. *Professor of Economics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 and New York University; and Director of Research, Joint Council on Economic Education, 432 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016, respectively. We are extremely grateful to the J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust, Inc. whose generous grant to the Joint Council on Economic Education and Princeton University made possible the research underlying this paper and the creation of the data base on economic education. The basic ideas for this work originated in the Joint Council, which provided supervision throughout the project. The data collection was carried out promptly and competently by Audrey McDonald. Invaluable suggestions and comments were provided by an advisory committee composed of Wil11am Becker, Indiana University; Marilyn Kourilsky, UCLA; Charles Plott, California Institute of Technology; and Sherwin Rosen, University of Chicago.

technology ; prices ; costs