Among ancient writers Aristotle offers the most profound analysis of the ancient Greek household and its relationship to the state. The household was not the family in the modern sense of the term, but a much more powerful entity with significant economic, political, social, and educational resources. The success of the polis in all its forms lay in the reliability of households to provide it with the kinds of citizens it needed to ensure its functioning. In turn, the state (...) offered the members of its households a unique opportunity for humans to flourish. This 2006 book explains how Aristotle thought household and state interacted within the polis. (shrink)

We use data collected among Hadza hunter-gatherers between 2005 and 2009 to examine hypotheses about the causes and consequences of men’s foraging and food sharing. We find that Hadza men foraged for a range of food types, including fruit, honey, small animals, and large game. Large game were shared not like common goods, but in ways that significantly advantaged producers’ households. Food sharing and consumption data show that men channeled the foods they produced to their wives, children, and their (...) consanguineal and affinal kin living in other households. On average, single men brought food to camp on 28% of days, married men without children at home on 31% of days, and married men with children at home on 42% of days. Married men brought fruit, the least widely shared resource, to camp significantly more often than single men. A model of the relationship between hunting success and household food consumption indicates that the best hunters provided 3–4 times the amount of food to their families than median or poor hunters. These new data fill important gaps in our knowledge of the subsistence economy of the Hadza and uphold predictions derived from the household and kin provisioning hypotheses. Key evidence and assumptions backing prior claims that Hadza hunting is largely a form of status competition were not replicated in our study. In light of this, family provisioning is a more viable explanation for why good hunters are preferred as husbands and have higher fertility than others. (shrink)

Household Finance: An Introduction to Individual Financial Behavior is about how individuals make financial decisions and how these financial decisions contribute to and detract from their well-being. Financial decision makers must plan, save, take on an appropriate amount of risk, insure assets when needed, handle debt appropriately, and invest, either on their own or through delegating portfolio management. These and other decisions are covered, both in the normative sense (i.e., what is best) based on conventional financial theory and in the (...) positive sense (i.e., what is actually done) based on observing behavior. Household finance thus covers both modern finance and behavioral finance at the level of the household decision-making unit. While modern finance builds models of behavior and markets based on strong assumptions such as the rationality of decision makers, behavioral finance is based on the view that sometimes people behave in a less-than-fully-rational fashion when making financial decisions. Important puzzles and issues are addressed, such as financial illiteracy, whether education and advice can improve outcomes, intertemporal consumption optimization, consumption smoothing, optimal dynamic risk-taking, the stock market participation puzzle, the credit card debt puzzle, anomalous insurance decisions, mortgage choices, skewness preference, investments driven by availability and attention, local and home bias, the disposition effect, optimal pension design, and improving outcomes through nudging. (shrink)

In Xenophon’s Oeconomicus Ischomachus instructs his wife in the management of their household. The detailed account of this subject which emerges has no parallel in Greek literature. Textile production is an important aspect of this household’s implicit self-sufficiency, which in this respect is still Homeric. Ischomachus’ division of his and his wife’s spheres of activity between outdoors and indoors also corresponds to Hector’s admonition to Andromache in the Iliad (6.490-93). There is a fundamental dissymmetry between Ischomachus and his wife. His (...) rationale for the division of labor between men and women reappears in another form in Aristotle’s account of the origin of the polis in the Politics. (shrink)

The idea that the household was the fundamental building block of ancient Greek society, explicit in the ancient sources, has now become widely accepted. It is no exaggeration to say that ancient Athenians would have found it almost inconceivable that individuals of any status existed who did not belong to some household; and the few who were in this position were almost certainly regarded as anomalous. In ancient Athens, as elsewhere, households ‘are a primary arena for the expression of (...) age and sex roles, kinship, socialization and economic cooperation’. It has been suggested for modern Greece that our own cultural biases, along with the Greek ideology of male dominance, have led to the assumption that the foundations of power in Greek society lie solely in the public sphere, and that domestic power is ‘less important’. In a less simple reality the preeminent role of the household cannot be underestimated. Here I hope to question similar assumptions about ancient Greece, focusing in particular on the relationships that existed between Athenian households and the property of the individuals, particularly women, within these households. (shrink)

In this article, I analyze the role the household ( oikos) plays in Isocrates through an exegesis of the author's letters to his erstwhile student and current monarch of Salamis of Cyprus, Nicocles. The monarch's household has a threefold role in the relationship between the elite ruler and his subjects. First, as the locus of his ancestors and their achievements, it offers competitors to Nicocles to be surpassed and a known standard for his subjects to judge their ruler. Second, as (...) the source of the monarch's public outlay, the household is a means by which Nicocles can appear magnificent; at the same time, however, he should be wary lest his subjects judge him ostentatious. Third, Nicocles invites his subjects to judge his conjugal behavior, offering it as evidence of his moderation. I conclude my argument with a challenge to an interpretation of the relationship between the few and the many as a contract; rather, this relationship is better characterized through the metaphor of service ( therapeia) drawn from the household. Isocratean political thought treats private and public domains as continuous with one another, regarding participation in political institutions as neither necessary nor sufficient to achieving good political judgment. (shrink)

Although on-farm research in severalparts of Africa suggests positive prospects for theadoption of hedgerow intercropping, this paper arguesthat the implications of intra-household processeshave not been considered in sufficient details. Suchinformation is necessary for targeting the technologyto specific socio-cultural localities and categoriesof producers and for anticipating adoption trends.Based on three case materials, two from southernNigeria and one from western Kenya, it examines howthe gender division of labor, decision-making, andareas of responsibility and inter-generational landallocation patterns determine that the interests andneeds of certain (...) household members are met, often atthe expense of others. The tendency of agriculturalresearchers to ignore the intra-household dimension isattributed to the frequent absence of sociologists andanthropologists as integral members of research teamsand the use of research methodologies that areinappropriate for uncovering the complexities ofintra-household issues. (shrink)

In the cash budgets of farm householdsin western Kenya, off-farm occupations and cropsaccount for the most important sources of income. Treeand livestock products are of secondary importance incash terms, although farmers attach great importanceto trees as a source of income because of the variousnon-monetary functions they supply. The findingspresented in this paper suggest that two variables,the domestic development cycle of households andwealth, are likely to affect the adoption pattern ofcertain introduced agroforestry technologies,depending on farmers' strategies to produce treeproducts and (...) milk for subsistence, largely for themarket or some combination of the two. However, forthe most part, farmers in western Kenya are likely togive first priority to investing in enterprises, suchas business and livestock production, that yieldshort-term financial returns as oppossed to investingin long-gestation agroforestry technologies whichprovide non-tangible benefits and financial returnsonly after several years. (shrink)

Efforts to combat the COVID-19 crisis brought mountains of legislation and guidance to coerce or encourage people to stay at home and reduce the spread of the virus. During peak lockdown in the United Kingdom regulations defined when people could or could not leave their homes. Meanwhile guidance on social distancing advised people to stay within ‘households’. This paper explores the legislation under lockdowns in the UK from March to October 2020 and the implications for women’s gendered caring roles. (...) The regulations and guidance assumed that households were separate units and ignored the interdependencies which exist between households and between individuals and wider society. The continuing focus in the lockdown regulations has been on households as autonomous, safe, adequate and secure. This overlooks the interdependency of human life, gendered aspects of caring and the inequalities of housing and living conditions, highlighted by feminist scholarship. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION A story has been passed down to us from some two millennia ago of a conversation between a wealthy Athenian estate owner,...

Household & Family Religion in Persian-Period Judah: An Archaeological Approach. By José E. Balcells Gallarreta. Ancient Near East Monographs, vol. 18. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 192. $33.95.

The fact that the permeability between family and work scopes produces work-family conflict (WFC) is well established. As such, this research aims to check whether the unequal involvement in household chores between men and women is associated with increased WFC in women and men, interpreting the results also from the knowledge that arise from gender studies. A correlational study was carried out by means a questionnaire applied to 515 subjects (63% men) of two independent samples of Spanish men and women (...) without emotional relationship, who lived with their heterosexual partner. As expected, results firstly show unequal involvement in household chores by women and men as it is higher in women that in men, and the perception of partner involvement is lower in women that in men. Secondly, those unequal involvements relate differently to men and women on different ways of work-family interaction. They do not increase WFC in women comparing to men, although there are tangentially significant differences in work conflict (WC) and statistically significant in family conflict (FC). However, perception of partner involvement on household chores increases WFC both in men and in women but not WC nor FC. Nevertheless, increase on marital conflict (MC) by domestic tasks neither affect in a significant way WFC in women nor in men, but increase WC in both women and men and FC only in women. Results also confirm that subject involvement on household chores is not a significant predictor of WFC in women nor in men, and that MC by domestic tasks is a statistically significant predictor in women of WFC and FC, but not in men. Thus, results show that traditional gender roles still affect the way men and women manage the work and family interaction, although the increased WFC due to involvement in housework is not exclusive to women, but also occurs in men. Personal and institutional recommendations are made on the basis of these results to cope with these conflicts. (shrink)

This study focuses on food waste generated by households in four Nordic countries: Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Based on existing literature we present comparable data on amounts and monetary value of food waste; explanations for food waste at household level; a number of public and private initiatives at national levels aiming to reduce food waste; and a discussion of ethical issues related to food waste with a focus on possible contributions from ecocentric ethics. We argue that reduction of (...) food waste at household level, which has an impact on issues such as climate change and unjust distribution of food resources, needs to be based on an appreciative and relational understanding of nature and food and not only on economic and moralizing arguments. This is done by drawing on an ecocentric perspective where food is seen as one of the areas where new narratives need to be developed to establish cultural habits replacing a focus on affluence and individual choice with a focus on participatory embeddedness in a more-than-human lifeworld. (shrink)

According to Aristotle, the household was one of the constituent parts of the state. He defined the household in its complete form as consisting of slaves and freemen. Within the household he discerned three primary relationships: those between master and slave, husband and wife, and father and child.

In the context of burgeoning urbanisation in developing nations, improper solid waste management poses a dual threat by engendering environmental pollution and exacerbating public health risks. This research endeavours to scrutinise the knowledge, attitudes, and practices on solid waste management among households in Bharatpur Metropolis, Nepal. Employing a community-based cross-sectional study design, our investigation utilised a random sampling approach to enlist 385 households, utilising a structured questionnaire. Data analysis was executed via SPSS version 22, hinged on a summated (...) scale to gauge the levels of knowledge, attitudes, and practices. Additionally, the Chi-square test was used to determine the association between respondents’ demographic attributes and their corresponding levels of knowledge, attitudes, and practices. The distribution of knowledge levels shows that a very small number of respondents (4.42%) have average knowledge level, the subsequent majority (95.58%) have satisfactory knowledge level, and none are categorised as having poor knowledge. Attitude levels reveal that very few have poor attitudes (4.68%), the subsequent majority (95.32%) have satisfactory attitudes, and none have poor attitudes. In terms of practice level, 17.66% are categorised as poor practitioners, 82.34% demonstrate average practices, and none are categorised as satisfactory. These results highlight the prevalence of good knowledge and attitudes among the participants, with a significant majority displaying average practices in the Bharatpur Metropolis. Furthermore, data analysis indicated that respondents with a higher educational background exhibited high knowledge levels in solid waste management. Unexpectedly, the respondents with higher academic backgrounds found a low level of practice in solid waste management compared to the prescribed standards. The imperative for policy intervention is underscored, necessitating the formulation of targeted policies for solid waste management in the locale. Additionally, the findings of this research provide a valuable collection of insights for academicians, indicating that although they possess good knowledge and attitudes regarding solid waste management, their practices in urban settings are lacking. (shrink)

This chapter explores Aristotle’s account of household hierarchy in "Politics" 1, focusing on his use of metaphysical explanation. It argues that Aristotle takes the natural rule of men over women within the household to be metaphysically explained by a difference in deliberative capacity. The central question addressed is how to understand this difference within the conceptual framework of Aristotle’s logical works. Is it essential, necessary without being essential, or accidental? Each proposal faces significant difficulties, leaving us with a dilemma. If (...) the difference between men and women is essential, then the household hierarchy is on a firm basis, but we have a conflict with Aristotle’s views on essence, particularly human essence. If men and women are not essentially the same, then this conflict is avoided, but other problems arise, leaving it unclear why men should be the natural rulers of the household. (shrink)

This paper uses multilevel modelling and Demographic and Health Survey data from five African countries to investigate the relative contributions of compositional and contextual effects of socioeconomic status and place of residence in perpetuating differences in the prevalence of malnutrition among children in Africa. It finds that community clustering of childhood malnutrition is accounted for by contextual effects over and above likely compositional effects, that urban–rural differentials are mainly explained by the socioeconomic status of communities and households, that childhood (...) malnutrition occurs more frequently among children from poorer households and/or poorer communities and that living in deprived communities has an independent effect in some instances. This study also reveals that socioeconomic inequalities in childhood malnutrition are more pronounced in urban centres than in rural areas. (shrink)

SummaryMalaria is a major cause of under-five mortality in Mali and many other developing countries. Malaria control programmes rely on households to identify sick children and either care for them in the home or seek treatment at a health facility in the case of severe illness. This study examines the involvement of mothers and other household members in identifying and treating severely ill children through case studies of 25 rural Malian households. A wide range of intra-household responses to (...) severe illness were observed among household members, both exemplifying and contravening stated social norms about household roles. Given their close contact with children, mothers were frequently the first to identify illness symptoms. However, decisions about care-seeking were often taken by fathers and senior members of the household. As stewards of the family resources, fathers usually paid for care and thus significantly determined when and where treatment was sought. Grandparents were frequently involved in diagnosing illnesses and directing care towards traditional healers or health facilities. Relationships between household members during the illness episode were found to vary from highly collaborative to highly conflictive, with critical effects on how quickly and from where treatment for sick children was sought. These findings have implications for the design and targeting of malaria and child survival programming in the greater West African region. (shrink)

In this article, we examine the effects of time spent in household labor on the gender gap in earnings. We identify that part of the gender gap in earnings directly attributable to women's greater household labor time. After controlling for years of work experience, hours worked per week, occupation, industry, union membership, and education, we find that household labor time can directly account for 8.2 percent of the gender gap in earnings. In addition to the direct effect of women's household (...) responsibilities on earnings, they also may affect occupational location, work experience, and number of hours worked per week, and through these variables, their earnings. These findings indicate that we cannot truly understand women's earnings relative to those of men without considering the impact of their unpaid labor on their paid work. (shrink)

Medhātithi reduces Manu’s descriptions of the householder as support and source of the āśramas to his performance of the five great sacrifices. Patrick Olivelle characterizes Medhātithi’s interpretation as “radical,” but a strong preliminary case might be made in its favor. Nonetheless, there are a number of reasons to resist Medhātithi’s interpretation. The more plausible interpretation of these passages is also the most straightforward. The householder is the support of the other three āśramas because he is economically productive. He is the (...) source of the āśramas because he has children. The householder is the best of the āśrama, in turn, because the broad benefits that he produces by these means, in particular, are so essentially important. Descriptions of the householder as source and support of the āśramas appear in a wide range of texts. In most of these contexts, they play a central role in justifying the status of the householder. At the same time, these claims often betray the same kind of ambiguity that Medhātithi notes. The fact that Manu counts these descriptions as distinct reasons for the householder’s superiority does not imply that other texts say the same thing. His precedent, however, is worth keeping in mind when interpreting parallel passages in other contexts. (shrink)

Household structure may have strong effects on reproduction. This study uses household demographic data for 59 women in a Caribbean village to test evolutionary hypotheses concerning variation in reproductive strategies. Father-absence during childhood, current household composition, and household economic status are predicted to influence age at first birth, number of mates, reproductive success, and pair-bond stability. Criterion variables did not associate in a manner indicative of r- and K-strategies. Father-absence in early childhood had little influence on subsequent reproduction. Household wealth (...) and alloparenting were positively associated with age at first birth. Alloparenting was negatively associated with reproductive success. Women in long-term conjugal unions had higher reproductive success than did single women. Number of adult male kin resident in the household was negatively associated with women’s number of mates. (shrink)

This investigation proposes a conceptual framework for measurement necessary for an analysis of household finance and economic development. The authors build on and, where appropriate, modify corporate financial accounts to create balance sheets, income statements, and statements of cash flows for households in developing countries, using an integrated household survey. The authors also illustrate how to apply the accounts to an analysis of household finance that includes productivity of household enterprises, capital structure, liquidity, financing, and portfolio management. The conceptualization (...) of this analysis has important implications for measurement, questionnaire design, the modeling of household decisions, and the analysis of panel data. (shrink)

One of the most vexed issues in income tax policy is how family or household status should affect tax liability. This article suggests a general approach for thinking about the treatment of households in the fiscal system generally under a utilitarian social welfare norm. The United States fiscal rules considered include those not only in the income tax but under Social Security, Medicare, and safety net programs. Among the recommendations that emerge from the analysis are (1) recognizing couples for (...) tax and transfer purposes without limitation to those that are married, (2) reducing the fiscal system's current distributional bias in favor of one-earner couples and its discouraging work by secondary earners, and (3) providing significantly more favorable treatment of households with children than of those with similar resources but no or fewer children, without limiting this more favorable treatment, in the manner of present U.S. law, to relatively poor households. Footnotesa * I am grateful to Lily Batchelder and Louis Kaplow for comments on an earlier draft. (shrink)

Evidence has accumulated in support of the notion that changes in household-level financial uncertainty may be an important fundamental cause of the global obesity epidemic. The timing and spatial/demographic incidence of the obesity epidemic suggest that economic policies aimed at expanding economic freedom may have inadvertently shifted risk to households, thereby generating a costly public health problem.

The paper explores the food-related practices of individuals and families with low socioeconomic status (SES), living in Polish cities and examines them through the lens of sustainability. It draws on two qualitative research groups: older people either already receiving retirement pensions below the minimum statutory pension or expecting to receive such benefits in the near future, and families with children. Building on a praxeological approach, the paper uncovers everyday practices that bear the hallmarks of sustainability, but are often overlooked in (...) mainstream sustainability discourse. While dominant narratives on sustainability focus mainly on the middle class in Western affluent societies and reduce actions for sustainability to “ethical consumerism”, this article seeks to draw attention to the everyday practices of marginalised groups, often part of informal economies, embodying key sustainable principles. By situating these practices within the broader context of the nexus of consumption, social class and global (semi-)periphery, the paper challenges the Western-centric and innovation-driven focus of current sustainability frameworks and calls for a more inclusive approach, acknowledging different economic and socio-cultural contexts. (shrink)

Over the past 20 years, a small but productive number of scholars have examined the mechanics and implications of the relationship between foreign-born, female domestic workers, and their employers, both in the USA and around the world. Although they have drawn compellingly on ethnographic methods and sociological theory to understand this relationship within the context of a global economy, few scholars have considered its sociolinguistic dimensions and the ways in which the differential of power between employer and employee is maintained (...) through particular linguistic strategies. In this paper, I seek to redress this lacuna by studying household Spanish handbooks, artifacts designed to teach a register of the language composed of formal commands and commonplace lexical items. I perform discourse analysis on three such handbooks published in the USA between 1959 and 2012, highlighting the different ways in which they attempt to facilitate communication between English-speaking employers and their Spanish-speaking employees. Separated by the span of a generation, these handbooks instantiate popular ideologies regarding the Spanish language and its speakers at the time of their publication – ideologies that have remained largely unchanged over the course of 53 years. At the same time, this sequential analysis illustrates the dynamic ways in which domestic relationships have been conceived over time, ensuring their asymmetry through discursive tactics that have become increasingly covert. (shrink)

For scholars of ancient Indian religions, the wandering mendicants who left home and family for a celibate life and the search for liberation represent an enigma. The Vedic religion, centered on the married household, had no place for such a figure. Much has been written about the Indian ascetic but hardly any scholarly attention has been paid to the married householder with wife and children, generally referred to in Sanskrit as grhastha: "the stay-at-home." The institution of the householder is viewed (...) implicitly as posing little historical problems with regard to its origin or meaning. This volume problematizes the figure of the householder within ancient Indian culture and religion. It shows that the term grhastha is a neologism and is understandable only in its opposition to the ascetic who goes away from home (pravrajita). Through a thorough and comprehensive analysis of a wide range of inscriptions and texts, ranging from the Vedas, Dharmasastras, Epics, and belle lettres to Buddhist and Jain texts and texts on governance and erotics, this volume analyses the meanings, functions, and roles of the householder from the earliest times unti about the fifth century CE. The central finding of these studies is that the householder bearing the name grhastha is not simply a married man with a family but someone dedicated to the same or similar goals as an ascetic while remaining at home and performing the economic and ritual duties incumbent on him. The grhastha is thus not a generic householder, for whom there are many other Sanskrit terms, but a religiously charged concept that is intended as a full-fledged and even superior alternative to the concept of a religious renouncer. (shrink)

Feminist anthropologists have evidenced the social and cultural aspects of motherhood and have challenged the universality of the nuclear family as the basis for residential and child-rearing practices. From a feminist anthropological perspective, the concept of the household has thus been redefined to capture the ways in which different principles of household recruitment and residence shape the activities and access to resources of women and men of different ages and status. This paper examines the relationship between household composition and coffee (...) production in Ocotal Grande, a Popoluca community in the Sierra de Santa Marta in Southern Veracruz, Mexico. It shows that polygamous households are larger and have higher yields of coffee than other types of households. However, this does not mean that all members of the household profit equally from their contribution to coffee production. While some relationship exists between labor input and returns, the distribution of benefits is based on gender and age hierarchies and is open to conflict and dispute. (shrink)

The article examines the effect of cooking food in kitchens on the health of women, as women and children are at a greater risk to indoor air pollution (IAP). It is important to study the cooking practices and prevalent behaviours among African women to understand the magnitude of the danger they face. The study suggests that a decline in the combustion of solid fuels and the use of clean energy can improve health among women and children, as well as sustainability (...) goals. Proverbs 17:22 says, ‘A joyful heart is the health of the body, but a depressed spirit dries up the bones’. Bible verse Numbers 35:33–34 indicates, ‘You shall not pollute the land in which you live’. The cooking fuel analysis framework among rural women in Africa will guide forward the governments’ sustainability policies for communities to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being of women and children. Contribution: The article conducts a comprehensive analysis of the literature on African cooking practices. A combined search string is made with keywords. Thematic content analysis is conducted with NVivo (produced by QSR International). The article covers two themes, namely improved well-being and suggesting policies to combat climate change and its impacts. Policies and schemes at grassroots levels and better economic conditions in African countries can help to overcome challenges and change health-damaging cooking behaviours. The new advanced sustainability analysis framework has the potential to influence modern kitchen fuels and increase the adoption of new technologies in African villages. (shrink)

We conducted a survey of residents of Kingston, Ontario, Canada, (n = 107) to understand their attitudes to and experiences of waste management and governance. Currently, the municipality is emphasising waste diversion and exploring new waste processing systems (WPS; e.g., incineration) to reduce costs. Using Foucault's governmentality theory, our data suggest Kingston's reliance on an attitude-behaviour-context model of behaviour change successfully fosters an environmental citizenship identity based on waste diversion (e.g., recycling). However, we argue that the neoliberal governmentality upon which (...) the attitude-behaviour-context model is predicated elides the need for, and inhibits consideration of, broader societal change concerning urgent environmental issues involving consumption and waste. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics V.6 Aristotle contrasts political justice with household justice, paternal justice, and despotic justice. My paper expands upon Aristotle’s sometimes enigmatic remarks about political justice through an examination of his account of justice within the oikia or ‘household’. Understanding political justice requires explicating the concepts of freedom and equality, but for Aristotle, the children and wife within the household are free people even if not citizens, and there exists proportionate equality between a husband and wife. Additionally, Aristotle’s articulation (...) and defence of political justice arises out of his examination of despotic justice in the first book of the Politics. Not only are the polis and the oikia similar insofar as they are associations, but Nicomachean Ethics VIII.9–11 suggests they are even isomorphic with respect to justice and friendship. Thus, in this paper I explore the relationships between father and son, husband and wife, master and slave, and between siblings in order to see what they tell us about Aristotle’s understanding of freedom, equality, and justice. (shrink)

The involvement of gentry women in domestic medicine in fifteenth century England has been explored very little. This is not surprising, given the inherent difficulty of such study: women were not trained in universities nor organised in guilds, they were not hired by cities or retained in rich households to provide medical care. The activities of the domestic sphere often went unrecorded; caring, including providing domestic medical treatment, was undertaken by women as part of everyday life. This chapter gives (...) an overview of how gentry women used plants and diet to promote good health. It considers how women were encouraged to take a proactive role in maintaining their household’s health. This encompasses both the production of medicine and the routine daily tasks, such as food preparation. (shrink)

Farmers face unique challenges and opportunities in saving for and maintaining income during retirement relative to other Americans. Farm households have higher income than the average American household but may decide to invest in their farm rather than save for retirement. We use information from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey, the Survey of Consumer Finances, and the Current Population Survey to answer three questions pertaining to the retirement preparedness of farm households. First, what is the composition of income (...) and assets for farm households? Second, how do retirement income and assets for farm households compare to those of all U.S. households and nonfarm self-employed households? Third, do retirement income and assets vary across subpopulations of retirement-age farmers? Our results suggest that, on average, older farm households received smaller shares of their income from retirement sources and had smaller retirement assets than older U.S. households. However, farm households had higher levels of total income and assets with most assets being concentrated in the farm operation. Farm assets may be relatively illiquid compared to retirement assets making it more difficult to rely on them for income during retirement. Among older farm households, those with low-sales farm businesses and Hispanic and non-White operators may be particularly unprepared for retirement relative to other farm households. Our results have implications for farm household well-being as operators’ average age rises. They highlight the similar and distinct challenges farmers face in saving for and maintaining income in retirement relative to other workers. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between banking access and farm household investment. The assets we examine are non-retirement financial assets, retirement financial assets, and real estate assets not owned by the farm operation. Using data from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey and the universe of commercial bank branches from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, we find that distance to commercial banks is negatively related to the degree of investment in each of these assets for farm households. We also find (...) that internet availability, as measured by the share of farms in the county with internet, is positively associated with farm households’ investment in each of these assets. Further our results show that farm households that are located in the South have the lowest bank access as measured by bank proximity and internet availability. (shrink)

ArgumentUntil the fifteenth century, celibacy was the rule among Christian scholars of northwestern Europe. Celibacy was a major element of the codified cultural representation of the scholar and his specific way of life, sustained by peculiar institutional arrangements and daily routines. Founding family households implied therefore a major reorganization of the scholar’s way of life. Broadly speaking, this involved refashioning the scholarly habitus, redefining social relations, and developing the necessary material infrastructure. The paper focuses on three aspects of this (...) process during a period characterized by uncertainty and experimentation. It discusses the structure of scholars’ families, arguing that at least until the middle of the sixteenth century, received models still persisted, while new viable models for articulating family reproduction with the transmission of scholarly dispositions had not yet crystallized. It then turns to the reorganization of domestic space, focusing on the different uses of the study to manage social distance and regulate domestic relations. Finally, among the different manifestations of the scholarly habitus, it argues that the emotional detachment of learned men was itself a learned habit. The well-documented discussion of competing options for organizing scholars’ family households and cultivating an acquired nature in academic settings provides an exceptional occasion to examine the way a group habitus is reshaped and, explore the cultural work involved in this process. (shrink)