Chayanov - Intro and Chapter 1 - Bao

I found it very interesting in Chapter 1 when Chayanov wrote, "Yet, while acknowledging the fact of this dependence we can dwell on the question of the internal character of this relationship and suppose that it is not family size which determines volume of family economic activity, as we formerly thought; on the contrary, the measure of agricultural activity, let us say, determines family composition. In other words, the peasant provides himself with a family in accordance with his material security" (64). Is this necessarily the case in Russian peasant economy? What about for those families living at the extremes - i.e. extremely high level peasant farmers or extremely low level peasant farmers? I think that the advantages and disadvantages at having more people under the household depends on more than just the material security, but also the goals and desires of the household. Another question I had was whether or not there are parallels in our own society where we see household size being based on "material security." I guess the first task would be to define what we mean by "material security," and whether it differs from the Russian peasants' definition of material security. For many of us, I am sure that this includes having a physical house (since this is a large investment that is worth money), and money itself. Is there a case in which material security is measured by something other than money? The fact that so many of our everyday exchanges deal in money or in currency of some form makes it hard to separate economy from household. Is it really even fair, therefore, to look at the household in terms of economy? Isn't it assumed that the overlap is inevitable? It is perhaps possible to consider this in terms of groups of people living at the same economic level, but I think it would be challenging to try and extrapolate this out to individuals of different economic status.