Some correlates of growth involve social progress and this chapter presents data on infant mortality, life expectancy, education and literacy. The chapter questions the quality of education in Southeast Asia,

The central idea of this chapter is value pluralism. This third possibility assumes that multiple co-existing economic systems, forms of economic growth, and models of human development will persist into the future. Within this pluralistic approach, I emphasize three interconnected goals: alleviating poverty, more fairly distributing prosperity, and enabling the pursuit and achievement of human capabilities. This possibility aims to mitigate the worst effects of capitalism, harvest the benefits of prosperity, and distribute wealth in ways that are meaningful to people’s lives. I argue that these three goals should be at the forefront of creating the world of tomorrow.

Lives are comprised of the stories we tell. At the beginning of this chapter, I argue for the importance of understanding how narratives not only mirror but also shape our understanding of ourselves and others. I draw on classic and contemporary research in social and cultural psychology to show how narratives are remembered and transformed over time and between people. I also discuss master narratives – dominant stories that help create shared understanding and cohesion in societies. I then introduce two dominant master narratives concerning economic development. The first highlights growing inequality and its detrimental impact on societies. The second emphasizes that, despite the vices of capitalism, economic growth has led to increased prosperity. I situate these narratives in the contemporary political and academic zeitgeist, where inequality dominates. I end the chapter by discussing the moral imperative to alleviate global poverty, create fairer societies, and pursue human capabilities as a guide for rethinking economic development.

I provide an overview of the book in this introductory chapter. The scope, limits, and style of the book are outlined. I introduce a central tension: that humanity has never been so prosperous, yet it often feels to many of us as though we never have enough. The view from manywheres is a central organizing principle in the book. The idea is to stay on the move between multiple disciplines, methods, and perspectives to comprehensively understand economic inequality. From this holistic view, I articulate a new vision for economic development – one based on the alleviation of poverty, the creation of fairness in our shared economic systems, and the pursuit and achievement of human capabilities.

I present the first of three possibilities for the future of economic development and inequality. In this scenario, the rich continue to get richer, leaving the rest of us behind. I describe four implications of this continued concentration of wealth. First, the super-rich will continue to disproportionately influence politics, furthering fragmentation and polarization in society and deepening civic discontent. Second, economic inequality will amplify ill-health. Third, poverty will persist despite increased aggregate prosperity. Fourth, the climate will continue to deteriorate to our collective detriment. This dystopian possibility underscores the urgency of imagining and pursuing alternative futures.

In this chapter, I explore the virtues of capitalism. I begin by acknowledging that exploring the virtues of capitalism is not in vogue, politically or in the academy. I present evidence, however, illustrating the reduction in extreme poverty throughout the world since the proliferation of industrial capitalism. This reduction in poverty has been uneven, bringing inequalities in the reduction of poverty. In the last forty years, levels of extreme poverty have stagnated or even increased. Although much of the world has benefited from increased prosperity, many have not. I then present evidence illustrating correlations between the increase in global prosperity from capitalism and increases in educational achievement and life expectancy, and decreases in child mortality. I next discuss the process of creative destruction as a driver of capitalism and, ultimately, prosperity – and how this process allowed India and China to escape mass poverty and emerge as economic powerhouses. In contrast to dominant discourse, recent evidence from Branko Milanovic suggests that the economic rise of China and India has led to reduced global inequality.

I present the second master narrative of economic development. I show how capitalism has created wealth and prosperity for many. I present evidence from Our World in Data showing the distribution of this wealth and prosperity, how it has varied over time, and how it is unequally distributed between various global regions. I situate this unequal global rise in inequality within discussions of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, whose ideas about capitalism and communism are put in dialogue and placed in historical context. I discuss some of the processes behind this unequal rise in global prosperity, and some of the ways in which poorer countries are poor and how they might escape poverty.

Chapter 2 explores contemporary racial inequity facing elderly Social Security beneficiaries. It includes an examination of structural discrimination in the labor market and in many other core aspects of American life (i.e., housing, education, credit/banking, health care), contributing to disparately lower levels of social security-based earnings upon which benefit levels are based and to greater financial precarity in retirement. It concludes by providing recommendations of potential remedies and mitigations for the disproportionately significantly lower and often below-poverty-line benefit levels received by elderly Black and Brown social security program beneficiaries and the major threats of additional inequities from regressive benefit cuts owing to impending social security trust fund insolvency in 2032–33.

Chapter 4 focuses principally on inequity in the Social Security Act’s means-tested Supplemental Security Income program, providing cash benefits for low-income adults and children with disabilities and low-income elderly persons. It explores the 1972 statutory exclusion from the Supplemental Security Income program of residents from the principal US territories (i.e., Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa), which are overwhelmingly Latino/a, Brown, Black, mixed-race, and/or Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and other Pacific Islander. This chapter includes a critical evaluation of the application of equal protection doctrine in the US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in U.S. v. Vaello Madero. This chapter also examines the lingering shadow of the overtly racist yet not overruled Insular Cases decided in the early twentieth century hovering over this controversy – a series of cases launching and reinforcing a separate and unequal regime of rights and benefits for territory residents through the construct of indefinite “unincorporated” territory status based on assumptions even conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch has characterized as grounded in “ugly racial stereotypes,” “bigotry,” and the “theories of social Darwinists.” It concludes, arguing for Congressional reversal of the Supplemental Security Income territorial exclusion and chronicles a recent, albeit narrowly unsuccessful, legislative attempt after Vaelllo-Madero to do so.

Addressing adversity and hardships that readers were likely to encounter in ordinary life (falls into poverty or bankruptcy, loss of parents, lover, caste and home, malignant misrepresentations, sexual harassment, domestic cruelty), these fictions were described as novels. In modeling the idealized responses of characters from the mercantile and professional ranks or from the lesser gentry to suffering and misfortune, Eliza Parsons, Jane West, Elizabeth Bonhote, Mrs. Gunning, Elizabeth Helme, Anna Maria Bennett, Mary Meeke, Ann Howell, Isabella Kelly, Susannah Rowson and many anonymous authors promoted new, proto-Victorian values. Novels of Education addressed issues of parenting and upbringing up to and including courtship and centered on debates about filial obedience, especially in choice of a spouse. Marital Domestic Fiction debated issues related to adultery, divorce, widowhood, spinsterhood, and second marriages. Female Biography combined the two with elements of other genres to follow one or more characters through a “Life.”

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, nursing homes were underfunded, under-regulated, and wildly at risk of a mass viral event. For decades industry watchers had called for oversight, but media accounts regarding home closures were misleading and poorly sourced. Increased private equity interest and legislative inaction heightened risks across the sector. COVID-19 was a perfect storm, preying on these systemic challenges and decimating robust, lively resident populations. More than 200,000 elder and disabled residents of nursing homes died of COVID-19 or related causes between March 2020 and March 2022. That number is grossly underestimated because nursing homes, which self-report their number of ill and deceased, feared bad reputations; many concealed deaths, mis-ascribed causes of death, or sent ill residents to nearby hospitals to avoid deaths on site. The conclusion of lawyers, staff, residents, and experts is that, while COVID-19 was a disaster waiting to happen, the mass deaths experienced in nursing homes could have been prevented. Since the initial years of COVID-19, some efforts by subsequent state and federal administrations have addressed inadequacies, but on the whole, little has been done to correct the many challenges the industry continues to face, even as the US elder population continues to rise.

Chapter 1 sets out the foundations of the book, beginning with a basic discussion of what is climate change and the global climate crisis. The chapter then moves on to the important Global North-Global South colonial context and the fundamental issues of environmental justice, climate justice and carbon colonialism. From there, the discussion ventures into an overview of who bears the brunt of climate change, concluding in a final section on the calls for a gender-based approach to solving the global climate crisis and the rationale for the book.

Chapter 5 proposes that friendship is one of the founding principles of, and one of the main reasons for writing, familial letters. It focuses on the exchange of letters between Keats and his friend the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon, suggesting that the exchange itself sustained but also threatened the friendship because of its engagement with a paradoxical logic of reciprocity that governs both friendship and letter-writing. The chapter pays particular attention to the inherent contingency of epistolary friendship – friendship that is supplemented or sustained by epistolary contact – in the case of Keats’s mutually flattering but sometimes difficult relationship with a man who shared the poet’s sense of artistic ambition while lacking his talent and genius. As a form of gift exchange, the interchange of letters between two friends may be said to be governed by the economics of an implicit but difficult and ultimately paradoxical reciprocity.