Gary Becker’s economics of population: reproduction and neoliberal biopolitics

Abstract

This paper argues that Chicago School economist Gary Becker’s theory of fertility underpins contemporary rationalities of global population governance. Drawing on feminist critiques of biopolitics, the paper proposes reproduction as a missing link that ties Becker’s homo economicus to the aggregate question of population. It argues that Becker’s work challenged macroeconomic theories of fertility by figuring reproduction, and hence population patterns, as governed by the personal utility-maximizing decisions of individuals. It further examines how his approach to fertility inaugurated reproductive decision-making as a regulatory node of population quality, one also tied to a particular sex, race and class politics. Finally, the paper briefly analyses the relationship between Becker’s contribution and today’s focus on women’s reproductive and productive decision-making in population governance in the context of development.

Keywords:

• Gary Becker
• neoliberal biopolitics
• reproduction
• fertility
• population
• development

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Derek Bell, Sydney Calkin, Martin Coward, Matt Davies, Mark Griffiths, Graham Long and Luca Mavelli for their thoughtful and constructive feedback on this paper. I also thank Caroline Battacharya for her research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Jemima Repo http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7598-6589

Notes

1 Becker’s contribution to postwar demographic politics has been overlooked in the critical literature on population politics, most likely because it emerged from demographic debates on declining fertility in the West, whereas histories of global postwar population governance usually chronicle Western fears of overpopulation in the Global South, often focusing on the geographically uneven sexual and racial politics of birth control (e.g. Bashford, 2014; Connelly, 2008).

2 The book took Becker, by his own account, six years to write and left him ‘exhausted’ and needing ‘roughly two years to regain [his] mental energy’ (Becker, 2009, p. 266).

3 See Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1992). Responding to the Nobel Committee’s characterization of his work as ‘controversial and hence, at the outset met with scepticism and even distrust’, Becker conceded that ‘nowhere has this characterization been truer than with my work on the family’ (Becker, 2009, p. 266).

4 A ‘post-transitional’ society is characterized by low fertility and low mortality rates.

5 One notable exception is the work of Luca Paltrinieri (2017), who has compared Malthus’s and Marx’s economic concepts of population with that of Gary Becker. Unlike previous scholars, Paltrinieri recognizes Becker’s achievement of producing a ‘new demographic economics’ that introduced a novel causal explanation for demographic change that likened fertility choices to consumer choices. As Patrinieri’s study constructs a genealogy of the relationship between economics and population, my work contributes to this discussion by examining the place and significance of reproduction in Becker’s economics of population.

6 Of course, due to the exploratory and remarkably anticipatory nature of the lectures, it is difficult to blame Foucault for this oversight.

7 Becker also added a separate section on ‘Human capital and the family’ to the first substantive chapter ‘Human capital revisited’ (1993 [1964], pp. 17–20).

8 The economic approach to the family was also developed by his colleagues Jacob Mincer and Theodore W. Schultz. Mincer’s work (1962; Mincer & Polachek, 1974) mainly focused on the impact of women’s earnings on labour force participation and the sexual division of labour, rather than fertility and population. Schultz (1973, 1974) developed the theoretical relationship between fertility and human capital in his later work, largely building on Becker’s work and leaving its basic theoretical argument unchallenged.

9 Becker republished most of these papers in his book The economic approach to human behavior (1976b). Its core ideas are reiterated in A treatise on the family (1981).

10 The 1960 paper does not yet explicitly ascribe the ‘psychic income’ gained from reproduction to mothers.

11 Becker believed that the women’s movement was ‘primarily a response to other forces that have dramatically changed the role of women rather than a major independent force in changing their role’ (1981, p. 356), reducing it to a form of ‘emotional support’ that followed, rather than caused, social change.

12 Black women in the United States were more likely to maintain households alone, and their labour force rates remained stable at around 40 per cent (see Nicholson, 2008, pp. 162–163).

13 The paper was first published in a special issue of Journal of Political Economy in 1990, and in 1993 integrated into the third edition of the Human capital book.

14 T. Paul Schultz was one of the earliest population economists to take up Becker’s approach. At the RAND Corporation between 1965 and 1972, during which time he founded and led its Population Research Program (now known as the Labor and Population Program), Schultz published several papers, often sponsored by USAID and the Rockefeller Foundation, examining the influence of women’s economic opportunities on their allocation of time and, hence, their fertility (e.g. 1967, 1969, 1974).

15 Boserup’s book also provided fertile ground for feminist critiques of development practice with the observation that women largely pay the price of modernization, for instance by reducing their access to productive work through technologization, the masculinization of the urban workforce and the limiting of access to financial resources to men as ‘heads of household’.

16 This is not to say that methods of direct bodily control, even coercive ones, have disappeared. Rather, they continue to coexist alongside neoliberal ‘empowerment’ policies.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Academy of Finland [grant numbers 285830 and 268181].

Notes on contributors

Jemima Repo

Jemima Repo is Lecturer in the Politics of Gender at Newcastle University (United Kingdom) and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki (Finland). Her research interests include feminist and gender theory, biopolitics and neoliberalism. Her book The biopolitics of gender (Oxford University Press, 2015) was awarded the 2017 International Studies Association Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Book Prize.