Ideas drive economic growth by freeing us from the curse of diminishing returns. That is true today and was true when economic growth began in northwestern Europe in the 1700s. Back then, ideas such as Arkwright’s factory revolutionized the cotton textile industry and drastically cut the cost of spinning cotton. A torrent of such new ideas, in fact, began began to flow through northwestern Europe from the 1600s on. Some came from scientific discoveries, although the wholesale application of scientific theories had to wait until the 1800s. Others reflected the new belief that innovation was possible and a new epistemological standard for determining what was true and worth investigating. The ideas could not be put to work, though, without the mechanics and engineers who had the skills needed to put the new concepts into practice. Northwestern Europe had such skilled workers, along with institutions that encouraged the search for new ideas. Did Europe’s religion also spur economic growth? Max Weber believed that Protestantism did, though recent research belies his claim. Christianity as whole, however, did foster economic growth in northwestern Europe in a variety of ways.

The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination is the oldest UN human rights treaty, and for over forty years, the Committee overseeing its implementation, CERD, has had the power to decide individual communications. Despite this long history, a settled evidentiary framework has not materialised yet. The Committee rarely discussed evidence, and when it did, the results could differ markedly: In Dawas and Shava v. Denmark (2012), a case on mob violence, the Committee did not directly engage with the evidence, which led to a resurfacing of evidentiary questions during the follow-up phase, when they could no longer be addressed. Far preferable is the approach adopted in Zapescu v. Moldova (2021), dealing with discriminatory employment practices, where the Committee discussed the standard of proof for procedural violations and the necessary evidence. More elaborations of this kind are needed for a clear evidentiary pathway to emerge.

Although the arts are often sidelined as electives in US education, discussed as secondary to more "important" disciplines, and even stereotyped as mere entertainment and leisure, this book applies interdisciplinary perspectives to emphasize and demonstrate the multifaceted ways in which the arts are indelible: foundational to who we are, to what we know, to how we know, and to how we interact with the world around us. This chapter describes what it means for something to matter, takes up foundational questions about the nature of art, and introduces the central argument of the book. The chapter draws on philosophical arguments and scientific research to argue that the arts cultivate a specific set of skills that enable us to better connect with the world: they sharpen our capacity for observation, foster our emotional intelligence, and encourage and enable our open-mindedness and flexible thinking. Moreover, they provide an avenue for self-reflection, expression, and belief revision. Ultimately, this chapter suggests that these cognitive and affective processes that are engaged through art not only enhance our relationship with art itself but also contribute to a richer life, helping us to navigate challenges and to find greater meaning in our everyday experiences.

The Real Pain of Punishment explores the true pains of incarceration using insights from empirical sciences and people with lived prison experiences. The book highlights the concept of “belonging” as an unprecedented lens for critically interrogating the legitimacy of incarceration across penal theory, sentencing practice, and human rights frameworks. The chapters chart pathways for bridging the gap between the normative idea of punishment and the stark realities of prison life. The final chapter, written with scholars currently and formerly incarcerated in a New York State facility, reflects on how embracing belonging within penal approaches can inform responses to harm grounded in humanization, proximity, empowerment, and collaboration. With this chapter and more, the book advances a call for deeper epistemic dialogue within legal discourse on crime, punishment, and justice. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

This introductory chapter illustrates why evidence in the individual communications procedure of the United Nations human rights treaty bodies (UNTB) is an issue requiring reflection and clarification. The chapter firstly contextualises this central topic of this book by broadly introducing the UNTBs’ mandates, composition and ways of working, as well as some general features of their individual communications procedures. Indications are given of how this legal, institutional and procedural setting interacts with the handling of evidence by the UNTBs, as well as some of the key questions it raises. The chapter further outlines some of the particular research challenges encountered in tackling the questions at the heart of this book, and how they have been addressed. It then goes on to introduce the four-part structure of the book and its ten chapters, including the final chapter, containing recommendations. Finally, this introduction discusses cross-cutting themes which emerge from the contributions.

The chapter analyzes the conflict between nascent bright green environmentalism and well-established fossil fuel-based developmentalisms, set against a backdrop of global population growth and resource concerns in the 1970s. It addresses the questions of how and why fossil fuel-based developmentalism contributed to the prolonged marginalization of bright green environmentalist ideas about zero-carbon offshore energy generation. Intellectually, architect Kikutake Kiyonori and engineer John P. Craven faced the spatial constraints inherent in island contexts, in this case Hawai’i and Japan. They focused on employing technology to decouple socio-economic development from ecosystem service and resource overexploitation to enable continuous industrial growth. Applying an oceanic-vertical perspective to island ecosystems and their littoral marine regions gives insights in some of the origins of zero-carbon energy technologies like offshore wind, floating solar photovoltaics, and floating nuclear plants. US and Japanese governmental support for already feasible offshore oil and gas exploitation and terrestrial energy generation nevertheless marginalized these ideas for decades.

In this chapter, we review the current state of this science for the measurement of daily ethnic and racial discrimination among ethnoracially minoritized youth. The goal of this chapter is to provide an understanding of the primary theoretical and empirical foundations for this research, to review the most recent findings and advancements in ethnic and racial discrimination measurement, and to highlight future directions that may prove important to understanding the daily experiences and health of ethnoracially minoritized youth. We highlight the foundation of this research in critical race theory, stress and coping research, and developmental and socioecological frameworks, we discuss the importance of daily methods in researching quotidian ethnic and racial discrimination, we review the health research that has contributed to our understanding of daily ethnic and racial discrimination assessment, and we highlight how measurement approaches should continue to evolve as social spaces, online contexts, and US society and institutions continually to shift.

A full conceptualization of discrimination requires that research focuses on preventing discriminatory behaviors, which are largely perpetrated by White individuals, as well as on larger systems of structural racism and White supremacy in which discrimination experiences are embedded and from which they emanate. The current chapter presents an integrated model of anti-racist socialization for White parents, synthesizing the critical consciousness, anti-racism, and parental racial socialization literatures. The model includes three elements of anti-racist racial socialization: (1) racial content, (2) socioemotional competencies, and (3) parenting processes. The model grounds anti-racist racial socialization in White families as part of the daily activity settings of parent–child interactions, positioning anti-racist socialization as regular, ongoing, and integrated into daily life.