the Logic of Life
nice little blurb from The Logic of Life
It was economist Gary Becker who showed the implications of Adam Smith's pin factory for marriage in the modern age. How had the division of labor become so sexually lopsided? The answer was the interaction of three economic forces: the division of labor, economies of scale, and comparative advantage.
As Becker knew, division of labor works because it unleashes economies of scale. In plain English, one full-time worker earns more than two half-time workers. That is often true for the most basic jobs, but much more so for the most demanding positions. How many top lawyers do half a law degree and then work twenty-hour weeks? How many successful business executives work only Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesday mornings? And the top earners, at the peak of a long, full-time career, earn much, much more than those half-way through their careers. It is a harsh truth about the world of work that for many professionals, the more work you have done in the past, the more productive each additional working hour becomes: a perfect example of economies of scale.
This means that a household in which both parents work part-time on their careers and part-time looking after children and the home does not make rational economic sense. Two halves are much less than a whole. Economies of scale dictate that, logically, one partner should apply himself or herself full-time to paid work. The other should work at home-making, and only work for money if there is some spare time available after the household chores.
So far this is classic Adam Smith. Where did the traditional gender roles of the 1950s come from? Becker pointed out the implications of the third economic force, the principle of comparative advantage. Comparative advantage says that division of labor is governed not by who is most productive in some absolute sense, but in a relative sense. In Adam Smith's pin factory, if worker Elizabeth can sharpen two pins a minute and mount four pins a minute in paper, while worker James can sharpen one pin a minute and mount one pin a minute in paper, the logic of comparative advantage says that James should be sharpening pins, even though Elizabeth does the job faster. The relevant comparison is not whether Elizabeth sharpens pins faster than James but whether, relative to him, she sharpens pins faster than she mounts them in paper.
Imagine that James and Elizabeth are married; now, replace mounting pins in paper with looking after babies. Elizabeth is a more productive worker than James but also a more effective parent. James is a bad worker but a worse dad, and so Elizabeth takes the rational decision to stay home baking cookies and looking after the kids, while James tries to scrape together a living as a real estate agent.
The logic of comparative advantage highlighted something that most men-except economists-have found it hard to get their heads around: there is no reason to believe that men were breadwinners because they were any good at it. They might simply have been breadwinners because getting them to help around the house would have been even worse.