1Bankovsky’s book is a substantial and much-needed contribution to the history of economics. It is a remarkable piece, combining a carefully constructed argument with a clear narrative. In many respects, it is also a highly original book with significant implications for the discipline of economics. The history of family economics is typically assumed to have started in the 1960s, when Gary Becker and others set out to apply rational choice theory to it. This widespread misconception has long obscured the many earlier ways in which economists understood and engaged with the family. For Bankovsky, the history of economists’ approach to the family reveals how they frame social problems, which makes the book doubly valuable: it is as much a history of family economics as it is a history of economics proper. Her argument is both persuasive and meticulously documented, bridging intellectual history and broader socio-political analysis.

2The book opens with an introductory chapter, which begins by examining the meaning of “family” across various disciplines. By comparison with neighboring disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, or philosophy, economics has had a rather distinct, and sometimes uneasy, relationship with the concept of family. This divergence has often led to misunderstandings about its historical contribution to the study of the family. This is the first goal of the book: to explain how economists have historically understood the family, through a well-informed reconstruction of their socio-historical context. The second goal is to show that throughout this history, economists have understood the family through the lens of poverty—albeit with different methodologies depending on the period. In other words, studying the family has always been a way for economists to illuminate the social problems of a specific time and place. Bankovsky’s framing here is particularly enlightening, as it situates economic thought within the lived social realities—illustrated by social history and literature—rather than treating it as a purely abstract or technical enterprise.

3The book focuses on key economists who have tackled the problem of the family, thus offering a genuinely new way of looking at the history of economic thought. Starting with Alfred Marshall’s work on industrial families, Bankovsky shows how he framed the problem of poverty, arguing that the appropriate answer to urban poverty was to foster family labor productivity (Chapter 2). The following chapter turns to the early Lausanne school and shows how Léon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto represented two different political poles regarding “the cause-effect relation between [family] immorality and poverty” (90). Chapter 4 then brings us to the US in the early 20th century, where a group of female economists associated with the field of home economics radically shifted the analysis by focusing on family consumption. In Chapter 5, Bankovsky explains how the New Household Economics, spearheaded by Becker in the 1960s, sought to apply rational choice theory to the family, shifting its focus to human capital within a microeconomic framework and leading to a radically more conservative political agenda. Chapter 6 studies the feminist response to Becker’s agenda in the 1980s and explains how it eventually recentered family economics on poverty and the social question at large. The final chapter (Chapter 7) explores, in the form of a postscript, the theoretical and political challenges of understanding the family in its contemporary forms, in particular regarding the modern ecological crisis. A brief presentation of each chapter is in order, as it shows how the view of the family is framed by moral and social issues of the time.

4Chapter 2 focuses on Marshall’s lesser-known work on urban industrial families in the late 19th century. For Marshall, the typical family unit consisted of a male breadwinner working outside the household and a female domestic caregiver, a model that he thought was best suited to modern industrial society. Bankovsky brilliantly demonstrates how Marshall expanded on Malthus’s agrarian focus to explicate the relation between family productivity and poverty alleviation. While Malthus defended a rather pessimistic vision that could only be addressed through moral restraint, Marshall thought that industrial society would render the Malthusian population problem increasingly irrelevant thanks to the significant increase in the production of consumption goods, which would in turn raise standards of living. The role of the government should therefore be to foster labor productivity through public education and family wages, while explicitly excluding women from the workforce and denying them contraceptive knowledge and abortion—policies that reinforced the gender division of labor. Bankovsky’s discussion here is particularly illuminating because it highlights how moral and gendered assumptions were a central part of economists’ representation of the family.

5Chapter 3 compares Walras’ and Pareto’s positions on the question: “Are families immoral because they are poor, or poor because immoral?” (89). Walras and Pareto offered two radically opposed answers to this question. For Walras, family poverty was caused by “badly designed government policies” (90), which would then lead to immoral behaviors. As a socialist, Walras opposed the typical French liberal argument of the time, which held that immoral individual behaviors led to impoverishment. This latter argument was notably defended by Pareto in his studies of population. Although Pareto acknowledged that families alone could not be held entirely responsible for their condition—given government corruption and defective political institutions—he nonetheless thought that poverty tended to originate from parental imprudence. In other words, “poverty indeed occurs because parents imprudently contribute more to population than to production” (104-105). As Bankovsky shows, despite the theoretical and political differences between them, both Walras and Pareto rejected institutionalized charity and essentially focused on families’ contribution to production.

6Chapter 4 deals with the contribution of female US economists in the early 20th century who were associated with the field of home economics and their pioneering work on family consumption and standard of living. In many respects, this chapter is a turning point in the book, showcasing the epistemological and gender shift in the study of family in the history of economics. The chapter opens with an interesting examination of the reasons why this shift occurred. It brings in elements of context drawn from social and material history, especially regarding the kinds of products that the US was producing at the time. Bankovsky then mainly focuses on three female figures: Hazel Kyrk, Elizabeth Hoyt, and Margaret Reid. All three used rather different methodologies but shared a common interest that originated in the significant socio-economic transformation that occurred in the US: the birth of a consumer-oriented society. This allowed them to devise both theoretical and empirically informed work in academia and in federal agencies. As Bankovsky argues by the end of the chapter, however, the focus on poverty was ultimately written out of the field’s vocabulary because it tended to be associated with more radical political agendas.

7The New Household Economics (presented in Chapter 5) emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s, spurred by Becker’s work. Bankovsky mostly centers her study on the 1960s and 1970s and draws effectively on the social movements of the period, such as the civil rights movement, weaving theoretical developments together with social history. She explains how Becker applied rational choice theory and the microeconomic toolbox to family behavior. Although one can argue that Becker brought back the study of family poverty to family economics, he radically changed its meaning. For Becker, poverty can be seen as a symptom of underinvestment in human capital by parents in their children. Although he supported policies that meant to foster higher levels of investment in human capital—such as education vouchers and old-age pensions—Becker advocated a conservative agenda, both in terms of economic policy and in terms of the social gender division of labor, which was based on naturalized gender inequalities. As Bankovsky reminds us, this led to the transformation of the “war on poverty” into a “war on the poor” (177).

8Chapter 6 explores the reactions to Becker’s agenda in the 1980s and 1990s. Bankovsky identifies two main poles of critique that emanated from feminist economists: equity feminist economists—focused on highlighting gender inequalities—and critical feminist economists, who advocated for the social recognition of women’s invisible work. As Bankovsky convincingly demonstrates, the issue of poverty soon re-entered the study of family economics under the influence of development economics and Duflo and Banerjee’s “poor economics” approach to the global south. This movement was further advanced through the increasing social recognition of alternative forms of family, such as rainbow families, allowing for a better depiction of how people actually live.

9The final chapter is a short postscript exploring both the theoretical and political challenges faced by family economics today. The last section closes with a reflection on the potentially productive dialogue between feminist economics and ecological economics, reminding us of the interconnected nature of the two issues as we seek to imagine a desirable future in the context of ecosystem collapse.

10The main thesis of Bankovsky’s book is that the study of the family in economics is organically connected to the problem of poverty, which is precisely what makes it so distinct from the study of the family by sociologists and anthropologists, for example. For the history of economics, this has significant implications. This means that the theoretical and empirical work on families’ consumption and production conducted by economists or home economists before Becker is not merely a by-product at the margin of the discipline’s history, but is essential to understanding the history of economics: the family is not just a social unit but a central conceptual piece that has shaped modern economic thought. For these reasons and many others, Bankovsky’s book is an important contribution that deserves to be widely read.

11Despite these undeniable qualities, I would like to offer two minor observations that might merit further discussion. The first one pertains to the flow of the narrative between chapters. Although Bankovsky carefully connects and builds dialogue between the authors discussed in each chapter, the narrative tends to move rapidly from one intellectual and geographical context to another. For example, the transition from Chapter 3 on the early Lausanne school to Chapter 4 on the old family economists in the US is a bit abrupt and could have benefited from a discussion on the geographical circulation of ideas and the reception of marginalism in the US.

12The second point concerns the author’s primary focus on economists in academia rather than on “bureau economists” employed in government agencies. I can well imagine that including the latter would have made for a rather different book. Nevertheless, in my view such a perspective could have complemented Bankovsky’s narrative by shedding new light on the history of empirical data collection within public agencies, particularly after the 1930s in both the US and Europe, when the “family unit” became an official theoretical reference in national accounts.

13These minor observations, however, do not detract from the value of Bankovsky’s work, which remains an important contribution not only to historians of economics but also to scholars in the social sciences interested in understanding the connections between the study of the family and poverty. For these reasons, it stands as an inspiring work that invites further interdisciplinary research on the still neglected topic of the family.