hard · Act reading

For decades, economists treated the household as a single decision-maker, a tidy fiction that let equations balance. The model assumed one set of preferences, as though a family spoke with a single voice when allocating its income. Newer work has dismantled this convenience, showing that spouses often bargain, and that whose name an income arrives in measurably shifts how it is spent. The old model was not so much wrong as incomplete: it described an outcome while ignoring the negotiation that produced it. What looked like unity, the research suggests, was the visible surface of a quieter contest. The author's primary purpose in the passage is to:

1. argue that the older economic model of the household was based on a falsehood and should be discarded entirely
2. explain why newer research revised an earlier model by exposing what that model left out
3. catalog the specific spending differences that arise depending on whose name income arrives in
4. defend the convenience of treating the household as a single decision-maker

Sign up free to see the explanation and track your rank →