Why and how economists have historically studied families is not well understood, neither by those in the discipline, nor by scholars studying families in neighbouring fields like sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. This lack derives from a mistaken view that family economics began in the 1960s when price theory was applied to family behaviour. It is also due to the narrowing of economics from the 1940s in the US, when social reform and advocacy work shifted to the discipline’s periphery. Affirming a contemporary need for gender-inclusive language, while using terms that access historical understandings, the book’s first goal is to show that economists developed methodologies for studying families as a function of how they conceptualised family poverty in different periods. Four historical phases are identified, with economists studying nineteenth-century deficits in family labour productivity in Britain and Europe, inadequacies in low-income family consumption in interwar America, underinvestment in human capital by a post-war ‘underclass’, and gendered injustices in resource distribution experienced by lone mothers, by women and girls in poor global South families, and by queer families. The book’s second goal is to show how family economists prioritised some social problems over others, allowing certain injustices to remain uncontested.

In the highly stratified servile societies of the Caribbean, numerous codes made it difficult for enslaved persons to distinguish themselves as generators of personal income. Yet an unmistakable feature of Caribbean slavery was the countless number of enslaved persons who succeeded in making money for their own benefit. Several historians have interrogated this history through their examination of the provision ground–Sunday market complex and the hiring and self-hiring of enslaved laborers. Despite the solidity of their scholarship, gaps exist in the historiography, not least of which is the general anonymity of these servile small-scale business people. This chapter, relying heavily on the 1831 publication of The History of Mary Prince, along with other contemporary sources as well as secondary publications, aims at narrowing the gap by focusing on the personal economic pursuits of Mary Prince, a relatively well-known enslaved female from the Caribbean who lived the last years of her life in London.

European arrival brought many hardships for tribes; however, tribes seized the new opportunities that arose. Tribes incorporated guns, horses, and other items into their cultures. Moreover, tribes organically modified their economic practices to effectively trade with Europeans. Tribal cultures influenced Europeans too. Europeans adopted Indigenous foods, medicines, housing, and political ideals.

This chapter looks at central bank digital currencies and aims to extend our understanding and the use cases for CBDCs in line with domestic and international economic policies. It examines central bank transactions and how money supply can be controlled and maintained using CBDCs. Over the years, the use of quantitative tightening has been limited due to the current functionality and utility of a country’s financial system. The “Klair Effect” is a form of quantitative tightening; it does not use the apparatus of interest rates to control the inflation rate; instead, a “delete button” to control the money supply on a central banks’ balance sheet.

This chapter provides an in-depth analysis and discussion of eco-tourism in Surama Village. It considers such tourism’s origins and development in the village, as well as the circumstances regarding its ongoing operations and daily processes. There is an emphasis on the ways that this tourism is described in the local discourse of villagers. The chapter examines villagers’ interactions with outsiders, such as tourists, tourism leaders, and consultants, within the context of eco-tourism and explores how eco-tourism fits into a broader discursive context of ‘development’ in the village. The chapter discusses issues concerning commodification, as well as alternative options for paid employment in the region. It begins to elucidate how villagers working in eco-tourism relate to tourists as outsiders. Throughout the chapter, there is a central focus on how eco-tourism provides a context through which outside resources (both material and immaterial) are acquired and transformations towards otherness and alterity are enabled.

This chapter sets the stage for the volume, describing an approach to Otto Neurath’s last years that weaves together biographical, historical, and philosophical strands. Neurath can also be examined from the angle of ‘exile studies’, enthusiastically adapting to British life and making contributions to philosophy, economics, and visual education that were ahead of his time. The themes of planning and education are introduced as narrative hooks to understand Neurath’s late work.

This essay draws upon recent developments in histories of finance and Black studies to argue for an expanded consideration of late nineteenth-century speculative fiction. In recent decades, speculation has emerged as a foundational methodology, critical framework, and literary genre in African American literary studies and Black studies. Yet, within this body of scholarship, speculative fiction is most often associated with anti-realist modes that imagine alternate futures while speculative reading and research methods double as a critique of our political and disciplinary limits. Through a close reading of Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition, this essay considers how speculation’s late nineteenth-century instruments and logics determine the novel’s political horizons and narrative structure. By attending to the financial workings of late nineteenth-century novels that might seem to strain against the bounds of either genre fiction or speculative research methods, this essay argues that we can begin to see how a work like Chesnutt’s interrogates a particularly postbellum outlook on the future, one in which the terms of financial speculation can only imagine a future that is an intensification of the past.

This chapter takes up a final source of constraint, specifically the norms of the profession and judging. The idea that unarticulated, and often inarticulable, shared understandings serve as a source of discipline and constraint has a long history. Among the labels for it are situation sense, craft values, professional norms, and tacit knowledge. For such norms to exert force, they must be shared, and the chapter explores ways in which the scope of shared professional understandings has diminished. The polarization present in our society has made its way into the profession. More broadly, our culture has developed in ways that privilege the tangible and quantifiable, which has led to a collective preference for metrics over more traditional forms of expertise.