Introduction
hence increasing their attainments. Equivalently, if education increases
patience, enhancing concerns for the long-run, it may also change the nature of
household production decisions, giving more weight to increased attainments
of children.
This theoretical formulation can be restated in terms of the developmental model. The
improvement in productivity can be reformulated as an effect of education on the
family and proximal processes within it, holding distal factors constant, particularly
income. Indeed, the ecological model describes the processes by which parents
enhance development or, in the Becker formulation, produce attainment. Education
enhances productivity for a given level of resource and so moderates the effects of
income.
The second Beckerian channel of an effect of education on the utility function can be
re-articulated as an effect of education on parental cognitions, i.e. attitudes, values and
beliefs. These also lead to a changed allocation of household resources as child
development (or educational success) becomes prioritised. The implications for
educational behaviours and investment in education are described here in section 2.3
and 4.2.
The indication of this discussion is that although the theory of the neo-classical
economic approach is based on utility maximising, rational agents, it is not unrelated
to developmentally grounded models of development. The assumption of rationality
implies a level of determinism and self-knowledge in the Beckerian model that is
absent in the developmental formulations. The mechanics of this determinism enables
a mathematical clarity with respect to the predictions of the model bought at the cost
of a strong and simple specification of the context of individuals’ consciousness and
temperaments. Foster (2002) usefully indicates the value of this approach in clarifying
the substitution effects that occur within families. On the other hand, the
developmental approaches offer insights into the processes of household production
of children’s attainment and development that are left as a black box in the economic
approach.
In our formulation these two methodologies are not empirically separable but offer
usefully different foci. The economic evidence demonstrates the importance of the
distal factors but we attempt here to place that evidence in a slightly different
theoretical and empirical context. In subsequent sections we have drawn on the
developmental literature to unpack the elements of the household production process.
This helps us to clarify the role of parental education as a particularly important distal
factor, i.e. as one that moderates the whole process of household production.
It should be noted, too, that there are also papers in the sociological or social policy
literature that assess the significance of distal factors without framing their theoretical
foundations within the Beckerian approach. Duncan et al. (1997) or Duncan (1994),
for example, provide developmental of sociological explanations for the effects of
distal variables.
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