How working hours influence the life satisfaction of childless men and women, fathers and mothers in Germany

This paper uses the German Socio-Economic Panel to show that fathers – and to a lesser degree childless men and women, are most satisfied with life when working full-time or longer. In contrast, whether mothers spend more or less hours in employment hardly affects their life satisfaction. The rational maximization of income as postulated by family economics cannot explain these results, as they are even found in households where women earn more than men. Because they are also found among those who hold secure jobs and have very little household work and childcare duties, these results contradict the predictions by expansionist role theory that men and women are better off in egalitarian employment arrangements. The results change little over time, with cohorts or with educational group-membership. For men, the results therefore fit best with the predictions of traditional role theory, which suggests that people are most satisfied when adhering to stereotypical gender roles.

Negative Scarcity And The Praxeology Of Open Source Software

Economics, which in its 20th-century sense deals only with optimizing the exchange of values, may be generalized to praxeology (von Mises 1949,) a comprehensive science of human action. Under a generalized praxeological definition of scarcity there are contexts in which the scarcity of software becomes negative, so that a rational maximization of return on investment in developing such software occurs when the software is opened to free distribution under a GPL-equivalent license.