Professor and Nobel Laureate Gary S. Becker is one of the founding fathers of the Chicago School of neoliberal economics and the foremost scholar of human capital theory. Human capital theory assumes that individuals make choices by constantly doing cost-benefit analyses in their everyday lives in accordance with their abilities. In the literature on neoliberal governmentality, the domestic and demographic aspects of his theory are often neglected. In fact, Becker had an enduring interest in the economic analysis of fertility and the micro-level household behaviour from the 1960s to the present. It was central to his development of human capital theory and the theoretical framework of New Home Economics (NHE). Modelled on the assumption of the monogramous, nuclear household as a historically stable utility-maximising unit, NHE sought to understand how men and women invested their time as value in abstract commodities (i.e. that could not be purchased in the marketplace), such themselves and their children, to produce surplus value. This paper places the sexual politics of the family and its division of labour at the centre of the critical analysis of human capital theory. In doing so, what beings to emerge is a retelling of the understanding of neoliberal interventions into social and biological reproduction, as Becker’s interest in the domestic sphere was motivated largely by the inability of demographers to explain and suggest remedies for the projected decline in fertility in Western countries the 1960s. Human capital theory is therefore theorised as a biopolitical project, amongst some of its central aims is to govern population by reorganising the sexual division of labour by modifying the variables through which women and men are assumed to make calculated life choices.
