Chapter 8 highlights the paradoxes of American and German housing policymaking amid surging house prices during the 2010s and early 2020s. American housing programs reinforced demand-led growth but also fueled financial bubbles and economic turmoil. In the post-2008-2009 period, this pattern persisted as policymakers continued stimulating housing-based growth, which simultaneously contributed to skyrocketing house prices, fears of a housing bubble, and an affordability crisis. In contrast, German policymakers retrenched housing programs that once supported the country's export-oriented growth regime by deflating housing costs. Consequently, they deprived themselves of the tools to respond to rapidly rising housing costs and affordability problems of recent years that risked fueling inflation and wage demands detrimental to export competitiveness. The conclusion of this book extends the broader lessons beyond the United States and Germany to such countries as Austria, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, illustrating how these countries' different growth regimes channel housing policymaking in different directions.

Americans understood the importance of establishing judicial authority over maritime war from the moment they began resisting British hegemony in the 1770s. The states’ unwillingness to prevent American seafarers from violating the rights of foreigners during the American Revolution provoked diplomatic controversies that undermined the drive for independence. After the war, supporters and skeptics of the new Constitution fiercely debated its creation of a federal judiciary. Anti-Federalist critics feared the centralizing and despotic tendencies of life-tenured judges who would be “subject to no control.” But even the “most bigotted idolizers of state authority,” Alexander Hamilton famously wrote in The Federalist, agreed that the federal courts should have exclusive authority over maritime cases. If Americans truly wanted a government that could fulfill the nation’s international obligations and maintain harmony with other sovereigns, they needed a judiciary with the power to resolve disputes arising at sea.

The modernist encounter with classical tragedy challenges received notions about tragic form and tragic sensibility: that it is incompatible with modernity (George Steiner) and that it is primarily a European/Eurocentric legacy. In engaging with classical Greek tragedy, modernist writers and theatre-makers (from T. S Eliot, W. B. Yeats, H. D., Ezra Pound, Edward Gordon Craig, and Isadora Duncan, to George Abyad, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, and the later postcolonial iterations of Wole Soyinka, Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona) create a set of relationships that radically rewrite ideas of influence and tradition and gesture towards an understanding of tragedy as a form of theatricality rather than as a play-text. This theatricality, read in conjunction with primitivism and orientalism, is not a quest for authenticity or for the lost humanism of the classics but helps to construct an experimental laboratory in translation, in performance, and in adaptation. From the Cambridge Ritualists to the later postcolonial readings, modernism helps to revision tragedy as part of world theatre.

That in our social work we need to constantly hold under review these two questions. Whose reality counts? and Whose knowledge is worth knowing?

Recounting the experiences of Wu Ruyin and his son, Wu Weiying, who between them held the title of Marquis of Gongshun in succession from 1599 to 1643, this chapter and the preceding one address two overarching issues. First, they explore how institutions and administrators persevere amidst crisis. It may be tempting to caricature late Ming bureaucrats as obdurately clinging to the past, but men like Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying adapted to new demands by incorporating new technologies and new ways within established frameworks. Few felt the need to abandon the “institutions of the imperial forefathers.” Second, these chapters examine the place of merit nobles in late Ming society. Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying were not men of the people, but by function of their social circles, they actively engaged in the capital’s broader cultural activities, and by virtue of their jobs as senior military administrators, they commanded surprisingly detailed information about common soldiers and officers, war captives and refugees, and even rumors circulating through Beijing. This chapter first examines Wu Ruyin’s role as the emperor’s representative in ceremony, which included officiating at rituals, offering prayers, and hosting banquets, and second, considers his experiences as a military administrator in a time of acute challenges.