I have always been interested in research that was relevant to real life and the real world. I was never interested in phenomena that were confined to behavior in a laboratory. My research ended up connecting not just with other people’s lives, but with my own life. That is, my research influenced my life; and my life influenced my research. The latter was evident in my research on the development of language and communication in children, chimpanzees, and bonobos. The former was evident in my COVID research where I drew upon my longitudinal study of a Maya community to realize during the pandemic – and empirically demonstrate – that parenting, child behavior, adult activities, and values in a rural subsistence ecology are quickly revived in modern human beings when such responses are needed to adapt to survival threat and a contraction of the social world. Those findings, in turn, have reinforced my focus on the dynamic interaction of social change, cultural evolution, and human development.

How has Britain been transformed since the financial crisis of 2008?

Departing from the conventional narrative that views borders exclusively as a source of hostility in inter-Asian relations, this book tells a story of how two revolutionary states launched movements and pursued policies that echoed each other as well as collaborated in extending their authority to the border to temper the transnational tendencies there – a process that the author characterizes as “joint state invasion,” which challenges both the Scottian narrative of state evasion and the Tillyan model of state formation. The Guangxi-northeastern Vietnam border is geographically, economically, and ethnically diverse and includes highlands, lowlands, and access to the Gulf of Tonkin. State activities at the border in the second half of the twentieth century were initiated in the context of historical precedents of successful, and equally importantly, unsuccessful state intrusions into the borderlands. There was a qualitative difference between state activities on the Sino-Vietnamese border that began during the Cold War and those that came before, where “distracted states” facing continuous wars were often unable to devote adequate resources to the task of border making. More importantly, limited coordination between the successive Chinese governments and the French colonial state left the border people significant “wiggle room” to circumvent the political authority.

Any fair evaluation of the Conservative effect (2010-14) must be cognisant of the context. Tom Egerton’s chapter will place the Conservative premierships in the six external shocks Britain faced, beginning with the Great Financial Crash and the Eurozone Crisis, before the impact of Brexit (and a debate over its external and structural causes), Covid, the Russo-Ukrainian War and the inflation crisis. How did each government succeed or fail in the face of compounding shocks? What opportunities and constraints emerged as a result? Only through an analysis of a decade of poly-crisis, and in the perspective of wider political change, can we make a conclusion on the question of ‘fourteen wasted years’.

In Chapter 13, we provide a preliminary analysis of the policy orientation of the EU’s post-Covid-19 new economic governance (NEG) regime to give policymakers, unionists, and social-movement activists an idea about possible future trajectories of EU governance of employment relations and public services. We do that on the basis of not only the recently adopted EU laws in these two policy areas, such as the decommodifying Minimum Wage Directive, but also EU executives’ post-Covid-19 NEG prescriptions in two areas (employment relations, public services), three public sectors (transport services, water services, healthcare services), and four countries (Germany, Italy, Ireland, Romania). Vertical NEG interventions in national wage policies paradoxically cleared the way for the decommodifying EU Minimum Wage Directive by effectively making wage policy an EU policymaking issue, but, in the area of public services, we see an accentuation of the trend of NEG prescriptions in recent years: more public investments but also much more private sector involvement in the delivery of public services.

Chapter 14 concludes the book, highlighting its major theoretical and practical insights for the study of EU integration and for the prospects of democracy in Europe. The technocratic design of the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) regime eschewed citizens’ and workers’ political rights to have a say in policymaking; and the commodifying bent of its prescriptions eroded their social rights to be protected from the vagaries of the market. After the pandemic, the technocratic bent in EU economic governance endured, as the National Recovery and Resilience Plans were co-designed by national and EU executives without any meaningful input from unions and social movements, and without national parliaments and the European Parliament making any amendments. The commodifying direction of the NEG regime also endured post-Covid, albeit with some concessions, notably in employment relations. EU executives have had to face the prospect that the hollowing out of social rights that resulted from commodification is pushing electorates towards Eurosceptic parties. In the current unstable context, labour politics matters a lot. Unions and social movements are essential in framing the social and political struggles about the policy direction of EU economic governance along a commodification–decommodification axis rather than a national–EU politics axis.

Joe Biden’s first two years became a turning point. The country had reached a point where it was obvious that the mix of government and markets had titled too much in the direction of markets. Besides the COVID pandemic, Biden confronted growing inflation, an economic recession, and Trump’s refusal to do anything to address climate change, together with a deeply divided partisan Congress. Biden galvanized the Democrats to unite around significant and bold responses and even obtained bipartisan support for some of his legislative agenda. He passed legislation to address COVID and increase government investment in infrastructure and technological developments. Regarding these successes and the inability to do more, Biden focused on how the balance between government and markets depends on the role of government right-sizing that balance by trying to restore confidence in American government and American democracy.

Bashing bureaucrats is an old American political tradition, and no one took this further than Donald Trump, who actively sought to fire civil servants and find other ways to subvert the bureaucracy. Over the nation’s history, the government has taken on an increasing and successful role in ensuring prosperity, protecting people, and promoting equality, and this success is due in no small part to the contribution of civil servants. Like all institutions, the government fails because its employees let it down, but it also fails because of incompetent political leaders who ignore the advice of knowledgeable and experienced civil servants or reject their advice because it conflicts with an ideological agenda. Andrew Jackson famously thought running the government did not require any special skills, and Donald Trump went even further in thinking that he did not need to know anything about how the government ran or what the civil service advised. The results were disastrous for both presidents and the country. Government needs administration, especially in times of emergency, and government needs public servants like Anthony Fauci to carry out its programs.

Nonresponse is a challenge in many fields, including demography, economics, public health, sociology, and business. This chapter explores nonpolitical manifestations of nonignorable nonresponse by focusing on population health. For many conditions, the decision to get tested or the willingness to allow a test is deeply wrapped up in the likelihood of having the condition. During Covid, for example, people who thought they might have been exposed to the virus were almost certainly more likely to get tested meaning that nonignorable nonresponse complicated our ability to understand the Covid outbreak. Section 13.1 discusses the challenge of estimating public health variables in terms of a nonignorable missing data problem. Section 13.2 explores how first-stage instruments can improve the efficiency and accuracy of efforts to assess prevalence. Section 13.3 presents a framework for comparing Covid positivity rates across regions even when testing rates differ.

A comprehensive look at the events of the 2020 election, Trump’s loss, his efforts to reverse the results of the election, the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and Trump’s second impeachment for incitement of insurrection. Addresses the reasons for the second acquittal and their implications.

This chapter examines how the digital financial infrastructure that emerged in the wake of the 2008 GFC assisted to address the financial, economic, and health challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. While the 2008 Crisis was a financial crisis that impacted the real economy, COVID-19 was a health and geopolitical crisis that impacted the real economy. In fact, during COVID-19 the financial system turned from problem child to crisis manager, having provided effective tools to support the crisis response. Notwithstanding the former, digital finance has also created new forms of risk (TechRisk).

This chapter applies Pragmatic Constructivism to assess communities of practice in global health governance. It focuses on the problem of containing contagious diseases. This is one of the tasks of the World Health Organization (WHO) and its practice of declaring a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). Given the uncertainty surrounding such a practice, which could lead to the isolation of an effected state, the decision inevitably involves judgement calls rather than the pre-reflexive implementation of pre-planned steps. Applying the first Pragmatic Constructivist test to this practice means asking if the community of practice charged with making that judgement is properly constituted and sufficiently inclusive. The evidence suggests that it is not. The chapter problematizes practice that unduly privileges technical (in this case epidemiological) expertise over social and political advice. A second application of the two Pragmatic Constructivist tests focuses on an inconsistency internal to global health practices as they relate to the distribution of vaccines. Practices that achieve more comprehensive coverage, such as the local manufacture of vaccines, are being prevented by intellectual property practices. The chapter considers how the knowledge of the Covid pandemic challenges the epistemic authority of intellectual property practices.

There are three broad categories of challenges faced by the Islamic Republic state, namely those emanating from the inside, those exerted on the state from the outside, and those arising from the fraying of the state’s relations with society. In each instance, the state has been able to neutralize any potential threats coming its way through a resourceful combination of foreign policy adjustments, heightened repression, and expansive securitization. Ironically, the comprehensive and punishing sanctions imposed on the state from abroad have only helped further erode the purchasing power of Iranians and have narrowed prospects for international exchanges and globalization. The outcome has been a further strengthening of the state and especially hard-line factions within it, along with a steady disempowering of civil society and increased costs of political opposition. Sanctions have weakened Iranian society and strengthened the state.