Princeton University Press
Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children
Key Metrics
- Viviana A Zelizer
- Princeton University Press
- Paperback
- 9780691034591
- 8.21 X 5.53 X 0.7 inches
- 0.73 pounds
- Social Science > Sociology - Marriage & Family
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
In this landmark book, sociologist Viviana Zelizer traces the emergence of the modern child, at once economically useless and emotionally priceless, from the late 1800s to the 1930s. Having established laws removing many children from the marketplace, turn-of-the-century America was discovering new, sentimental criteria to determine a child's monetary worth. The heightened emotional status of children resulted, for example, in the legal justification of children's life insurance policies and in large damages awarded by courts to their parents in the event of death. A vivid account of changing attitudes toward children, this book dramatically illustrates the limits of economic views of life that ignore the pervasive role of social, cultural, emotional, and moral factors in our marketplace world.
Author Bio
Viviana A. Zelizer is Lloyd Cotsen ‘50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. She has published books on the development of life insurance, the changing value of children, the place of money in social life and the economics of intimacy. She has also studied topics ranging from economic ethics to consumption practices.
A collection of her essays appears in Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. In 2017 Princeton University Press published a new edition of her book The Social Meaning of Money, with a preface by Nigel Dodd and an afterword by Zelizer and Columbia University Press published a new edition of Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States, with a preface by Kieran Healy.
Her most recent book is Money Talks: Explaining How Money Really Works (Princeton University Press, 2017) co-edited with Nina Bandelj and Frederick Wherry.
Source: Princeton University - The Program in Law and Public Affairs
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