I begin by highlighting three characteristics that ancient elites imagined that enslaved persons ought to have: usefulness, loyalty, and property. I start by noting how discourses of enslavement and utility are intertwined. The Shepherd’s concern for utility is most clearly expressed in its two visions of a tower under construction, in which enslaved believers are represented as stones who will be useful (or not) for the construction of the tower before the eschaton. Second, I turn to the concept of loyalty (pistis), suggesting that the Shepherd uses such language in a way that encourages God’s enslaved persons to exhibit loyalty to God at all costs. Finally, I point to how enslaved persons in antiquity were often characterized as commodified by placing the Shepherd alongside inscriptions about enslaved people from Delphi and documentary correspondence. Not only does the Shepherd portray its protagonist Hermas as lacking bodily autonomy while being exchanged between divine actors, but the text also calls on God’s enslaved persons to purchase other enslaved people who are imagined to be their physical property (e.g., as houses, fields) when they arrive in God’s city.

In this chapter, we discuss practical ways One Health approaches can be integrated into legal and policy action from the lens of the environment sector, to deliver improved human, animal, and ecosystem health outcomes. Relevance to specific processes are highlighted: (1) national implementation of global environmental conventions, including in laws and policy frameworks; (2) environmental and social impact assessment; and 3) local governance systems, including in and around protected areas. Examination of these topics is ground-truthed by national, regional, and subnational examples, including from Liberia, building on lessons from the country’s robust multi-sectoral One Health coordination platform that can guide One Health action at all levels. We also explore the relevance of One Health economics to guide law and policy decisions frameworks in reducing environmental degradation and other trade-offs and maximising societal co-benefits. Finally, we discuss how industry standards and voluntary frameworks, such as the IUCN Green List Standard and its accompanying One Health tools, can have a supporting role in advancing good governance and multi-sectoral management for conservation and health outcomes.

Daily life in cities is often about balance and compromise. Urban densities facilitate things being in close proximity and provide convenience for residents, but they also create an opportunity for traffic congestion and increased social and environmental inequity, and the possibility of lower-density suburban sprawl. To promote urban sustainability, a careful balance of economic development, ecology, and equity is required. In this chapter, four examples of urban sustainability crises and the dramatic response to them are examined. The cases include Miami, US; Oslo, Norway; St. Georges, Grenada; and Shenzhen, China. In each situation, the sustainability crisis emerges from a deeply set awareness of diminishing environmental quality of life and a feeling that the residents’ sense of place is under threat. The drivers of this threat are deeply embedded in social and economic factors. In each city, the policy switch to enhanced sustainability results from an aggressive, multi-scalar effort to alter and redirect the pattern of urban spatial development.

Economics is the study of decisions made when allocating scarce resources to satisfy needs and unlimited wants and business is the enterprise engaged in the production of goods and services, usually for profit. Australia needs innovative individuals with a knowledge and understanding of economics and business who question, process and analyse information, make informed decisions and then reflect upon outcomes. With the end of the mining boom, decreases in manufacturing due to offshoring of labour and the depletion of Tier-1 mines, innovation and entrepreneurship are necessary for a prosperous Australian economy in the future. This chapter will: outline where Economics and Business appears in the Australian Curriculum; provide information on delivery and assessment of Economics and Business knowledge and understanding with illustrations of integration with other learning areas; integrate Economics and Business with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and perspectives and Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia; and then explain how Economics and Business inquiry and skills are delivered through the creation and implementation of a business plan.

In this chapter, I investigate the aura of criminality that lingers around capitalism in feminist discourses of the long 1970s. Navigating landmark works of feminist economics, I establish how polemical publications by Gayle Rubin, Silvia Federici, and Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa instrumentalize the logics and rhetorics of theft in order to evoke the exploitation of women in capitalism, and I examine how these logics and rhetorics are likewise deployed to structure specific figurations of stealing in literary works by Marilyn French, Alix Kates Shulman, Marge Piercy, Rita Mae Brown, and Audre Lorde. My focus here falls primarily on those protagonists who remain trapped within the strictures of the realist feminist novel. What strategies do these women develop for resisting or mitigating the institutionalized terms of their financial oppression? Through an analysis of the ways in which stealing operates within a wider matrix of crimes against the kindred systems of capitalism and patriarchy, I investigate how theft figures in feminist writing as a viable compensatory opportunity for women. Regardless of its criminality, to what extent does the feminist novel present the case that stealing – in its various guises – is sometimes the only pragmatic response to the immediate problem of women’s oppression?

The introduction initially approaches the topic of money and American literature via key passages from the work of Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Toni Morrison. It then traces three key threads running through the following chapters. Firstly, it considers the close interrelationship between money and ideas of American nationhood: how the unity of the “United States” has been fostered, and unsettled, through monetary initiatives, schemes, and experiments. Next, it addresses the interplay between materiality and immateriality – “real” and “imaginary” forms of value – that has been a persistent topic of debate in American monetary history, as well as the closely related question of money’s deep affinity with writing as a different but connected form of value-bearing inscription. A pivotal, money-themed chapter of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) serves as a case study. The introduction’s final section foregrounds the fundamental question of money’s relation to power and identity: its constitutive role in structures of inequality, exploitation, and marginalization and, in particular, its inextricability – as society’s dominant measure of value – from conceptions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Examples from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nella Larsen serve to illustrate these ideas.

Chapter 1 explains how economics plays a crucial role in sustainable development, affecting the well-being of current and future generations. Economics explores how scarce resources are allocated and distributed and analyzes the trade-offs in decision-making. The stock of capital assets, or economic wealth, in an economy determines economic opportunities and individuals’ standard of living and prosperity. Economics recognizes that the economy is embedded in nature and that natural capital contributes to economic welfare in three ways: natural resources provide inputs to production, the environment assimilates waste and pollution, and ecosystems provide essential goods and services. A pessimistic view is that environmental scarcity will limit economic growth, leading to economic collapse. An optimistic perspective is that human creativity, innovation, and technological advancements can avert environmental scarcity, allowing economies to prosper. Economics can help guide society toward a more optimistic development path by creating incentives and safeguards for sustainable use of the environment.

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.