Every 5 years, the World Congress of the Econometric Society brings together scholars from around the world. Leading scholars present state-of-the-art overviews of their areas of research, offering newcomers access to key research in economics. Advances in Economics and Econometrics: Twelfth World Congress consists of papers and commentaries presented at the Twelfth World Congress of the Econometric Society. This two-volume set includes surveys and interpretations of key developments in economics and econometrics, and discussions of future directions for a variety of topics, covering both theory and application. The first volume addresses such topics as contract theory, industrial organization, health and human capital, as well as racial justice, while the second volume includes theoretical and applied papers on climate change, time-series econometrics, and causal inference. These papers are invaluable for experienced economists seeking to broaden their knowledge or young economists new to the field.

This chapter explores the cultural obsession with entropy in the London-based magazine, New Worlds. Associated with the 1960s New Wave, New Worlds was instrumental in bringing an experimental literary sensibility to the genre of science fiction. Writing against the grain of prevailing academic criticism, the chapter unearths a latent utopian impulse within the metaphor of entropy. Artists, writers, and critics associated with New Worlds considered the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy, to be a fitting image for the dystopian mood of post-war British literature and culture. The chapter argues that their obsession with the disintegration of society at a time of post-imperial decline reveals, rather, hope among the ruins. It offers a close reading of British-based artist and writer Pamela Zoline’s short story “Heat Death of the Universe” (1967), in which the boredom of a Californian housewife stretches into a Dadaist utopian daydream about the heat death of the universe, the theoretical endpoint of entropy. By situating fictions published in New Worlds within the wider political contexts of anti-colonial resistance, the New Left, Second Wave Feminism, and Gay Liberation, the chapter uncovers a persistent strain of utopian possibility through Britain’s cultural obsession with entropy in the 1960s.

This chapter offers a utopian reading of the British science fiction subgenre of the cosy catastrophe. Coined by Brian Aldiss in 1973 as a pejorative term, the cosy catastrophe names a distinct group of English fictions written after World War II. Writers such as John Wyndham, John Christpher, Rose Macauley, J. G. Ballard, and Charles Eric Maine imagined apocalyptic disasters in which middle-class male protagonists ‘have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off’, as Aldiss put it. Whilst Aldiss dismissed such fictions as ‘devoid of ideas’, the chapter presents an alternative reading, arguing that cosy catastrophes offer powerful allegories of a distinctively English postwar sensibility. Within this curious narrative pleasure of a masochistic embrace of decline we can identify a paradoxical utopian longing for the dystopian smashing of systems. The chapter concludes that the cosy catastrophe is best understood as a cultural articulation of English declinism at the moment when decolonisation confronts postwar Britain.