Customer Reviews

A Treatise on the Family: Enlarged Edition

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I thought I knew what I was getting when I bought this book. I knew of Gary Becker and his work, including his award of the Prize in Economic Sciences (known loosely now as the Economics Nobel). I suspected his mathematical approach would be too hard for me. But it wasn't really that. The maths can be followed if you put a bit of time in (though I got lost in some appendixes).

I was hoping to actually learn some useful techniques from his mathematical approach to sociological and anthropological analyses. It wasn't to be.

What stumped me was the economics. I will be dragged off to my incinerator never understanding concepts like marginal utility. There is some synaptic proscription going on in my brain that, like a union on strike, holds back at the barriers then bans any hope of my comprehension of such economic staples.

Never mind. I'm sure it's a good book for any economists who want to know a bit of family sociology from the individualist maximization prespective. Given that it's a treatise, and that he has a section on the evolution of the family, it is disappointingly Western in data and outlook. (The evolution is actually a potted 100 years or so of recent Western history.)