This introductory chapter identifies key puzzles and questions, lays out the book’s main argument, and highlights the book’s contributions and implications. The book develops a new comparative framework that integrates credit regimes and social policies in the study of comparative political economy. It contributes to a range of literatures in political science and sociology, including the literatures on states and markets by moving beyond the focus on a purely substitutive link between welfare states and financial markets; it expands work in international political economy on capital flows and policy scope by introducing the notion of credit regimes; and it sheds new light on research on income and wealth inequality by documenting credit markets’ regressive allocation and distribution of resources and responsibilities and new forms of inequality and discrimination. The chapter then lays out the book’s main empirical strategies and data sources. The book’s key approach is to studying individuals within particular institutional constraints in different countries cope with social risks and seize social opportunities. It does so by drawing on a new measure of credit regime permissiveness, longitudinal micro-level panel data from Denmark, the United States, and Germany, and an original cross-national survey.

The neuroimaging era has brought an increasingly refined understanding of adolescent brain maturation, yielding insight into the protracted development of social cognition, learning, and executive function beyond childhood. These data have been applied in multiple domains of everyday life, including education. Adolescent brains have emerged as a theater of moral panic over the implications of social media on the one hand and income inequality on the other for mental health, social cohesion, and individual and community life chances. In this setting, neuroscience has been invoked to account for adolescent vulnerability and to develop interventions to mitigate behavioral problems and mental illness. These include the introduction into school curricula of mindfulness-based stress reduction, resilience training, “brain-based” pedagogy, and a neuroanatomical lexicon of introspection in which kids are encouraged to identify experiential states with brain regions. “Neuroeducation” represents a constellation of fluid alliances between the education profession, Silicon Valley tech solutionists, and the human potential movement. Cognitive neuroscience plays a notional role, chiefly via proponents’ invocation of developmental plasticity as physiological justification for interventions that are often based on preliminary research and remain wanting in clinical support. In this essay we explore neuroeducation through the lens of critical neuroscience.