First edition, first printing. 8vo. xii, [4], 288 pp. Original green cloth, spine lettered in gilt, dust jacket (short closed tear to rear free endpaper, contents otherwise clean and unmarked; light shelf wear and a few tiny nicks to extremities of jacket, still a very good copy indeed). Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 1981.
A pioneering work by the Nobel Prize winning economist Gary S. Becker that ‘explored the division of labour among members of a family, a social institution which economics had hitherto almost totally neglected. Becker’s ‘new economics of the family’ parts company with the traditional conception of the family as a one-person consumption unit and instead views the family as a multi-person production unit, literally producing ‘joint utility’ with the aid of inputs consisting of the time, skills and knowledge of different members of the family, after which the theory of production can be usefully applied to household behaviour’ (Blaug)
