In Chapter 11, we elaborate on the meaning of education, vocation, and cognitive function from the perspective of narrative identity. Many participants voiced problems completing education and holding jobs, emphasizing identity conclusions of personal failure. Cognitive function was mentioned less often in the life stories, possibly because it is less identity defining than education and vocation. In parallel with the bleak stories of failure, participants storied well-being into their identities in the context of education, vocation, and leisure activities. These contexts scaffolded the agentic, growing, and valued selves and relationships characterized by togetherness, acceptance, worth, and giving. Many also mentioned friendships as a boon of participating in these activities. These subthemes may give rise to identity conclusions such as “I feel valued by my colleagues,” “I can make friends,” and “I can learn from studying,” illustrating the narrative identity underpinnings of empowerment and social connection that are crucial to personal recovery. Finally, our participants narrated living space as a source of well-being, emphasizing safety and control. This chapter underscores that how narrative identity is created in the context of broader socially and culturally structured activities is central to personal recovery.

Although significant progress has been made in dealing with ancient economies through the establishing of new methodological approaches (like the New Institutional Economics), old-school Political Economy still plays an important role. It endeavours among other things to describe and evaluate the causes which lead to economic growth, thereby including factors which cannot be subsumed under the category of ‘institutions’ (exclusively focused on by the NIE) like demography or climate. Recently, this traditional approach has been intensively adopted to explain and measure the growth of ancient Greek economies between the ninth and fourth centuries, today viewed as an established fact in contrast to the older consensus, which was characterised by scepticism regarding the capability of ancient societies to generate sustainable growth. This chapter presents the most important factors that were (supposedly) conducive to growth and describes and their mutual interplay and interferences. In a further section, some methodological and empirical problems of the way 'ancient growth' is quantified in contemporary research are discussed. In a final section, some thoughts are offered on geo-economic factors, assumed by the author to have had a decisive impact in bringing about 'growth' or concentrations of wealth in some areas and milieus.