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This chapter discusses the cries and alarms of contemporary commentators worried about the shrinking birthrate in Japan. The need to ensure the futures of offspring makes demands on family economics and time, through greater investment in children's educational supports, longer years of co-residence with children who usually make little or no financial contribution to the household. There is an “our baby” image of co-parenting where the parents carefully share responsibility for home care, transport to day care, and other functions. This requires flexible work accommodation, difficult in most full-time work, and a decidedly organized attitude with which to confront the disbelief or perhaps dismay of employers and relatives. Childbearing choices are further constrained by the high cost of raising a successful child, and the standard definition of success is hard for parents to ignore. Having babies, when it is hard to have even one, let alone the multiple births advocated by commentators and officials, makes for complicated strategies of parenting.

This chapter provides an overview of the section of the text that examines family change. A main theme of the discussion is the emergence of the field of family economics and the importance of longitudinal studies for testing the theories this field has produced. One particular area of discussion is the chapters' contribution to our understanding of the long-term economic impacts of marriage, divorce, and changes in household structure.

This concluding chapter discusses the progress that has been made with matching models on both the theoretical and the empirical front. Regarding theory, the power and the limits of the transferable utility (TU) model are now better understood. The TU framework can (admittedly under specific assumptions on preferences) encompass most aspects of family economics, including fertility, domestic production, risk sharing, and the consumption of public commodities. On the empirical side, the econometrics of matching models have seen several major advances, with the Choo-Siow model as a prime example. The chapter also considers what matching models teach us about reality, such as the asymmetry between male and female demand for higher education, and the relationship between assortative matching and inequality. Furthermore, a host of social issues can only be analyzed from a general equilibrium perspective; this is evident in the case of Roe v. Wade.

This chapter describes epidemiologists' and lay people's discontent with racial classification, with special attention to a subtle but significant distinction in the source of their dissatisfaction. Scientists express frustration with categories that have uncertain and leaky boundaries while lay people have criticized the act of categorization itself. Scientists are quite adept at talking about the health implications of race in a piecemeal, separable, factorialized way. For them, race is often constructed as cultural difference, and occasionally as biological difference. On the other hand, race for lay people has a kind of all-encompassing quality to it with links to factors such as family economics, attributions of class, feminized labor, segregation and neighborhood environments, and educational opportunities.