The family and the marketplace

This item from Charles Colson's Breakpoint commentaries made me a little uneasy at the very least: "Families and Markets." It concerns a conference this past spring in which "Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, an economist at the Hoover Institution and the author of Love and Economics, told the attendees that 'the market needs the family.'"

When most of us think of family, we do not automatically think next of the economic marketplace. We think of holidays spent together, stories told and songs sung at bedtime, confiding in each other fears and aspirations for the future, mealtime rituals, photo albums, picnics in the summer, arguing with a sibling about something inconsequential (or consequential), looking out for a little brother or sister at the school playground, baptisms, marriages, pain over a divorce, grieving at a death, attending church together, leaving home for the first time, and returning home with the first grandchild.

I am confident that Dr. Morse did not intend to reduce the family to a mere player in the market. There is surely some legitimacy to pointing out the relationship between family and market as long as we don't start there and leave it at that.

The very next day, in fact, Breakpoint continued with Morse's observations on the dangers of extending the logic of the marketplace, with its emphasis on personal choice, into the institution of marriage. Under the influence of the market, marriage comes increasingly to be seen as a mere contract, whose terms can be altered at the discretion of its parties. But, as Colson properly puts it, marriage is a covenant, not a contract.