A Treatise on the Family

A Treatise on the Family is the representative work of American economist Gary Stanley Becker on the family, originally published by Harvard University Press in 1981, with an enlarged edition in 1991. The Chinese translation is based on the 1991 Harvard University Press enlarged edition and is included in the Commercial Press "Chinese Translations of World Academic Classics" series. The book proposes studying the family through economics or rational choice. Becker argues that the family is not merely a consumption unit but a production unit made up of multiple people: members invest goods, time, money, and skills to produce joint utilities such as children, health, skills, and reputation, and family behavior is simultaneously constrained by money and time. Methodologically, he uses tools such as maximizing behavior, stable preferences, human capital, and market equilibrium to discuss single-person households, the division of labor and sexual specialization within the family, polygyny and assortative mating in the marriage market, the demand for children and fertility, the effect of family background on children's opportunities, inequality and its movement across generations, altruism within the family, and extends to families of nonhuman species, marriage and divorce under incomplete information, the long-term evolution of the family, and the relationship between the state and the family. The enlarged edition adds appendices on human capital and the sexual division of labor, a restatement of the economic theory of fertility, human capital and the rise and fall of families, and the state and the family. The book brings discussions of the family from demography, sociology, law, education, and biology into a unified economic framework, and is a representative work of micro-demographic economics and family economics that sparked wide discussion upon publication.