Gary Becker Interview (page: 4 / 9) Nobel Prize in Economics	Print Interview

What effect has the liberation of women had on the family? Women have gained a measure of equality in the workplace, pursuing professional careers in areas where they weren't before. Many more women are able to support themselves now. What effect has that had? It certainly is an economic issue.

Gary Becker: Absolutely. A Very big effect.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I have a chapter in The Treatise on the Family called, "The Division of Labor Between Husbands and Wives," where I go into it. Another controversial chapter. I go into that a lot. I've tracked a lot, in my work, the growing employment of married women, the consequences of which I discuss in the book -- in my work -- for family size. No question it has been one of the important factors reducing family size. When they're at work, and she doesn't want to take the time, or doesn't have the time, or time is too valuable to be having four, five children, the way families even as late as the turn of the century in the United States had. So they're going to have one or two, much smaller size. It's going to affect their propensities to divorce. If a woman has a good job and her marriage isn't that great, in the past, well, she was scared about getting divorced. Who was going to take care of her and so on? And of course marriage often brings -- divorce brings these doubts today. But now a woman who has a job can say," Well yes, I don't know if I'm going to get support and so on, but at least I can go out and earn some income. I'm not completely dependent," and I think that's been an important factor.

Do you think women's increasing economic freedom has heightened the divorce rate?

Gary Becker: There's no question it's heightened the divorce rate. That's well documented. It's heightened the divorce rate, it's cut fertility down. It's affected the relation between husband and wife within a marriage. These are all things that I think are very well documented and this approach can help with. I discuss a bunch of these problems. Before I leave that subject, I should stress that doesn't mean everything is hunky-dunky between me and a lot of feminists in this area. On the one hand, my book is discussed a lot by the feminists, sometimes positively, but sometimes, some parts of it negatively.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I stress that there are reasons why we've had this gender division of labor between market and household. That while women will work more in the market, that I can understand and show why. Yet it's not simply brainwashing that has led women to be doing more of the housework, that there are reasons why that's the case. And that we'll modify that, we're going to eliminate that entirely. That was my argument, and I discuss that in fair detail. And that has been very unpopular with -- not every woman. My wife calls herself a feminist, and she thinks I'm right on, and she teaches about women in the Middle East. But a lot of others think that's not right, that all this is a result of social policy and that I've gone too far in thinking there's something else working there. So that's been a source of some contention between me and -- particularly -- some women who are economists, who are feminists.

Is it a truism that after divorce these financially independent women find themselves less economically comfortable than while they were married?

Gary Becker: Generally, they're much worse off. There's no question about that. That's well documented. And I think it has something to do with "no fault" divorce. I have a discussion of that in my book, and in this case, a lot of women and men who originally thought I was wrong about that have come around to that position.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. There's no question that divorced women have, on the whole, financially suffered. They may feel, "Well, nevertheless it's still a good decision." They weren't happy and all that, that's fine. But financially, they have suffered, and it should be obvious that they lose one source of income. They get some child support, but often that's inadequate or it's not even paid. Particularly lower income women just don't get the child support, I mean a lot of violation of contract by the man on that. So many women are in rather poor circumstances after the divorce. If we didn't have "no fault," if their agreement had to be initially achieved in order to get the divorce, I think they would be in a stronger bargaining position and therefore could bargain for a better financial position. So that's been my argument, but the facts are clear, that they're worse off on the whole.

Another major area of your work has been the economics of crime and punishment. Could you tell us how you came to work in that area?

Gary Becker: We just had a symposium out at the University of Chicago. I got some award at the university and a good economist, Levitt, was speaking about crime, and he had a statistic. He said, "Becker wrote his paper in 1968, and how much work by economists was there prior to 1968 on crime?" The answer was zero. Now how did I get interested in it? Well again, it seemed to me a natural application of, of the type of thinking I was doing. If we have a minute, I can tell a kind of amusing story.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I was rushing down to Columbia, driving down to give an oral exam to a Ph.D. student. I had to park, and I had to decide whether to park illegally on the street around the Columbia neighborhood, or put it in a parking lot which was further away and of course cost some money. And I said, "Well, what's the chance I'll get a ticket?" And I made a calculation in my head and I left it on the street. And as I walked over to the exam, I said, "But if I'm going through that calculation, then the police must also be deciding how often they should inspect in order to determine what's the right thing for them to do, which is costly." So I asked the poor student to solve that problem when I came in, and he or she -- I don't remember whether it was a man or a woman -- she couldn't do it, not naturally. I was looking more at the thought processes and not whether they could do it, and they did fine. And then I kept thinking about it, that this was a good problem, because if we take the approach I used, that people decide on crime with similar sort of calculations as they decide on whether to become a professor, that's the starting point. There is no difference between criminals and professors in that sense. Of course, some people are honest, they don't want to be criminals. But the kind of calculation, "Can I do better by this?" as opposed to something else, is a calculation I think a lot of criminals make. And now we have to have enforcement. How much money do we want to put into enforcement? To capturing and convicting and punishing people? If we improve legal opportunities through education -- my human capital work came in -- then that should reduce crime. So I built a framework to discuss those issues, where improving education will reduce crime, improving the likelihood that we will apprehend and convict criminals would reduce crime, and then I went back and looked how criminals will respond to this and came to a bunch of conclusions about how much we should put into one activity, another activity. I did some preliminary tests on this with actual data, whether the criminals actually respond to punishment, whether improvements in education reduce crime. I had a series of students who followed that up. So this is the way the area developed. It's now a very big area in economics, some very good work being done, some by my students, some by a lot of other people. But my orientation was this little sort of experience I had going to this exam, and then building on my type of work at that time.

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It came from your own experiences as a criminal?

Gary Becker: As a criminal. It turned out I was a criminal, no question. Misdemeanor I would say, but it was an illegal action. The bottom line is I didn't get a ticket. At that time I got away with it. But absolutely right.

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