Hayek Program Podcast · Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Nina Bandelj — 2023 Markets and Society Conference Keynote

October 29, 2025·45 min·2 clips

Black families carry significantly more education debt, while white families hold far more financial assets for children.

1. Hayek Program Podcast features Nina Bandelj’s 2023 Markets and Society Conference keynote on the social life of money for children. 2. Bandelj is a sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine, the co-director of the Center for Organizational Research, and the author of Money Talks. 3. The keynote asks how American parents save, spend, invest, and borrow for children, and why those flows matter for markets and society. 4. Bandelj opens with the claim that raising a child born in 2015 to age 17 costs about $234,000 on average and almost $450,000 in the top third of income. 5. She adds that college is not included in that estimate, even though public university costs are around $20,000 a year and private university costs around $53,000. 6. Her first framework comes from Nigel Dodd’s line that “Money is a process, not a thing,” which she uses to organize the talk. 7. The first part of the talk tracks new forms of money for children, including 529 savings plans, child-owned accounts, and federal PLUS loans. 8. Bandelj says 529 assets reached nearly $330 billion by the end of 2018 and the number of accounts rose to nearly 14 million. 9. She says PLUS loan balances for parent borrowers reached nearly $90 billion in 2019. 10. The second part explains “relational work,” where money helps people form and maintain social ties. 11. Bandelj uses “earmarking” to show that wages, gifts, compensation, and babysitting money fit different relationships. 12. She uses Pretty Woman to show how money can change a relationship from a client exchange to a romantic one. 13. The third part argues that families have “entangled economic lives” shaped by finance, parenting products, state policy, and social inequality. 14. Bandelj draws on 120 interviews with mothers and fathers of middle school children, plus Consumer Finances, Consumer Expenditure, and Panel Study of Income Dynamics data. 15. She says the social value of children has shifted from “providing for children” to “investing in children.” 16. She links that shift to Viviana Zelizer’s “Priceless Child” and argues for a “Priceless Child 2.0” centered on human capital. 17. Bandelj says parents now face pressure from intensive parenting, extracurriculars, school choice, and expensive tutoring markets. 18. She also notes that housing debt for good school neighborhoods often matters more than toys or short-term spending. 19. The tone is lecture-like and evidence-heavy, with slides, survey data, quotations from parents, and occasional humor about parenting. 20. Listeners interested in family economics, sociology of money, and inequality will get the most from this talk, while listeners wanting light entertainment will probably skip it.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Hayek Program Podcast