Yuval P. Yonay concludes her post with: "I aplogize for a too lengthy message, and being a sociologist I hope I didn't make any awful mistake in economics." She could have first read the Dixon article from the site kindly provided by Mat Forstater, just I did, before attempting her contribution. She also could have endeavored to explain the extent to which Becker's economic analysis differs from Marshall's strictures on method, instead of asserting a difference between their work. Only from such serious effort could she have helped to advance the discussion or understanding among participants. "Shooting from the hip," which is what I would describe her response to be, is not helpful. Thus, Yuval claims: "I don't know Dixon's paper but I assume that he preferred 21,000 apartments over 23,000 not because of his assumption that the black entrepreneur is less motivated by profits but rather due to the positive impact of profits gained by black entrepreneurs (and assumingly, the more numerous black workers in their firms) on the overall economic standing of the Afro-American community. Earned income have a more lasting contribution than public housing." In the first place, that's not Dixon's excuse for preferring the less efficient allocation of funds. Rather, his claim is that of a "collective black preference for having its own productive facilities" (p. 429n). But surely, people in the white, yellow, brown, or whatever pigmentation community also would like to have their own "productive facilities," don't they? And the funds to acquire productive facilities just don't drop from the sky or grow on trees. They have to be borrowed from savings (or taken from income earners through taxes). That is why worrying about the cost of "capital" or funds (or the opportunity cost of the collected taxes), and employing the funds efficiently to be able to recover the interest cost, wage expenses, materials in construction, and earning the developer's own wages (profits) matter in a correct analysis. And to promote economic growth in a community, efficiency in the allocation of resources matters. Encouraging a higher-cost production, which Dixon's article suggests, is not the way to promote economic well-being among the black or any other community. Going back to Becker, Yuval writes as if he recommends any particular family arrangement rather than attempts to explain the choices that spouses have made. Thus what appears to Yuval as a critique of Becker's work: "... but the question is what happens if the spouses decide to separate. In such a case, women are left stranded (and this is just one problem)," is really little more than asking whether the family utility function defined over "until death do us part" is the same as one defined over "until divorce do us part"? The answer is no, and "neoclassical economics" can handle or model that too. In all this, one is only following Marshall's point that economics is not a body of settled conclusions to be applied in all circumstances but a *framework* or an apparatus of the mind for understanding human behavior in different circumstances. James Ahiakpor