re other trade-offs that exist as between family forms. In societies where polygamy is an institution, more women will get married, but some will have to share a husband. In this book, Becker is employing the principles of economics--which are, fundamentally, the principles of choice among limited alternatives--to examine such fundamental family relationships as marriage and childraising. He shows how the impulse to maximize utility, the basic impulse in economic theory, bears even on our affective relationships with spouses and children. He goes on to reach conclusions about the logical consequences of various choices regarding family forms structure and of some possible public policies toward families. The nature of some of his conclusions, in turn, invite debate on the nature, validity, and limitations of this approach to family relationships.
The approach adopted by Becker is highly quantitative in the theoretical sense: he is concerned not with "facts and figures" but with a close mathematical examination of the economic logic or consequences of family choices. None of the mathematics is extremely advanced; Becker uses many summation series but no differentials or integrals, and anyone who has had college algebra should be able to follow most of Becker's mathematical reasoning. However, the mathematics is intensive, and the reader
not accustomed to working out his arguments may be tempted to coast over the mathematics and accept Becker's conclusions without being clear on his assumptions, assumptions which set the limits of the formal validity of his conclusions.
As an example of Becker's approach to his material, we may take his discussion of the economic determinants of family size--the economic demand for children (pp. 93-112). Becker suggests (p. 94-95) that the demand for children is rooted in Darwinian natural selection. The descendents of families that have large numbers of (surviving) childre...