This chapter summarises our findings, namely that there are multiple policies and interventions that offer value for money due to their high BCRs, and others that perhaps should be revised or shelved owing to their low BCRs. This may then create a happier society and more effective government spending.

The Introduction outlines the aims and structure of the book. It begins by situating the Cambridge Social Ontology (CSO) project within the Cambridge tradition and outlining its critique of mainstream economics. It then presents the two central components of CSO, Social Positioning Theory (SPT) and Critical Ethical Naturalism (CEN), as complementary accounts of the social and ethical constitution of human life. Attention is given to the ethical and political dimensions of SPT and to the way CEN provides its ontological and moral grounding. The discussion further examines CEN’s Aristotelian roots and its potential to offer a coherent alternative to dominant moral frameworks. The final section introduces the comparative focus of the book, which explores the relationship between CSO and Amartya Sen’s contributions to political economy and ethics. Together, these sections establish the theoretical and methodological basis for the analysis that follows and clarify the importance of ontological consistency for reviving political economy as a comprehensive social science.

The conclusion offers an overview of the book’s central arguments. It first reflects on the development of Critical Ethical Naturalism (CEN) within a particular interpretation of Aristotle, showing how this alignment strengthens both its ethical content and its role within Cambridge Social Ontology (CSO). Situating CEN in this way provides a richer ontological grounding for understanding human flourishing and supports the broader project of reviving political economy on realist foundations. The discussion then revisits the comparison between CSO and Amartya Sen, highlighting that while both seek to integrate ethics and economics, they rest on contrasting ontological orientations. Sen’s reluctance to engage systematically with ontology produces conceptual ambiguities that limit the coherence of his framework. The conclusion also considers how Nussbaum’s and Robeyns’s liberal presuppositions reinforce these tensions. It closes by reaffirming the necessity of ontological inquiry for conceptual clarity, ethical critique, and the revival of political economy as a comprehensive social science.

We are living through a period of growing global disorder. There are various causes, but one is the declining unity and efficacy of the political ‘West’ – the coalition of countries, including the UK and led by the United States, that came together after the Second World War to defend and promote liberal democracy at home and open markets abroad. For countries like ours, in a changed and changing geopolitical landscape, the challenge is not to build a single new world order, but instead to contribute to what the historian Adam Tooze calls ‘world ordering’. This means coalitions of the willing, on a range of issues, to meet the challenges that people and nations need to face together. This imperative makes Britain’s relationship with other European countries, and the EU, more important, not less. These countries, and the EU, have shared values and interests with the UK. We face a common threat from an increasingly anarchic form of ‘might makes right’ globalisation. So we need to renew our cooperation that was sabotaged by Brexit.

Brexit was an act of gross economic vandalism. Many leavers understood that at the time. Most were indifferent. When push came to shove, an economic hit seemed, to those who thought about it at all, to be a price worth paying for autonomy. ‘Take Back Control’ proved to be a winning formula. Ten years on, we are in a better position to decide how much control we have really gained, and how much it has been worth to us. Control and autonomy are legal and constitutional concepts, but their value depends on political realities. In a world of huge nations like the United States and China, it is in the interest of smaller nations to join together in powerful multinational blocs like the European Union. Its members have more control and more global power collectively than they can ever hope to have individually. Britain’s own ability to exercise ‘control’ over its own fate is inevitably more limited outside the European Union.

Focusing on the 1961 UNESCO Conference of African States on the Development of Education, this chapter shows how and why public schooling became the defining development project of West African independence. At the highpoint of African decolonization, two radically new propositions intersected, each shaping the other: the rise of new economic tools, including human capital theory and manpower planning, and the triumph of anticolonial and antiracist demands that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights indeed be universally applicable.

Oil has seriously impacted the institutional development of the state in the Arabian Peninsula. More specifically, the sudden and unprecedented acquisition of massive oil revenues resulted in the freezing of the state’s formal and informal institutions, at the point at which petrodollars were injected into the state’s coffers. From then on, state leaders were able to deploy the state’s wealth to dictate the pace and direction of institutional change. Over time, any institutional change has been directed towards enhancing regime security, and the pace of change has been calculated and deliberately slow. Any political opening has been dictated by the logic of state power maximization (in relation to society). At the same time, partly to ensure its popular legitimacy and partly through the vision of its leaders, the state has deployed its massive wealth both to foster rapid economic and infrastructural development, and to enhance the living standards of its citizens. In other words, whereas oil may have stunted institutional development –– i.e., an institution’s curse –– it has been an economic blessing.

The ecological paradigm in stormwater management mimics natural hydrology by diverting stormwater into well-designed green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) practices that also enhance biodiversity and community resilience. The challenge for municipalities is to devise institutions to encourage the adoption of GSI. Detroit, Michigan, imposed a drainage charge on all city property owners based on the extent of impervious areas. Property owners can reduce the drainage charge by using GSI. This analysis situates an economic model within the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework. The team evaluated fourteen properties where the owner installed GSI. Properties with positive net present values for their GSI tended to be less complicated and offered more cobenefits. Information gathered from broader conversations suggests that many property owners did not know how to reduce their drainage charges with GSI practices. Therefore, the drainage charge’s price signal may not work as intended. The GKC institutional analysis showed that noneconomic factors, such as prosocial values or corporate policy, also influence GSI adoption. Sharing information may encourage others to adopt GSI practices. Nongovernmental organizations can act as information brokers to share knowledge that might otherwise be proprietary or hard to find. Highly visible projects may educate property owners about GSI practices.

Why Gothic sensibility and aesthetics matters for Ruskin as he prevails against the broken world warranted by laissez-faire economics. Ruskin, in his concept of ‘plague clouds’, is one of the first to locate what has become known as the Anthropocene. The chapter details the characteristics of Gothic, which will then frame the inquiry into craft work.

One relatively recent development related to the growth of practical market design is the need to deal with big strategy sets that may involve parts of the economic environment beyond the boundaries of the individual marketplaces. A related matter is that in naturally occurring environments, strategies may be discovered in the course of play. Discovering new strategies is very much like inventing new technology, or new game theory: all of these things can change the game in important ways. These issues blur the borders of what historically were regarded as separate domains of game theory, namely the theories of cooperative and non-cooperative games.

This chapter introduces the two contributions that constitute Part V, “Economics and institutional design”.

The literature on learning in games interprets equilibrium strategy profiles as the long-run average behavior of agents who are selected at random to play the game. As suggested by Nash, in normal-form games we expect that as the agents accumulate evidence about play of the game they will develop accurate beliefs, so that the stationary points of the process correspond to the Nash equilibria. The definition of Nash equilibrium applies unchanged to games in extensive form, but the learning foundation for it does change, because in games with a nontrivial extensive form simply playing the game repeatedly may not lead agents to know how their opponents would respond to deviations that the agents have not tried. Thus there is no reason to expect learning by myopic agents to lead to Nash equilibrium in general games, as agents may not experiment enough to learn the consequences of deviating from the equilibrium path. Instead, learning is consistent with self-confirming equilibrium, introduced by Fudenberg and Levine in the early 1990s. The focus here is on settings where the agents are patient, so they do have an incentive to experiment. In this case, Nash’s mass action interpretation of equilibrium is again valid. But extensive-form games typically have many equilibria, and not all of them seem equally plausible. An advantage of the learning approach is that some actions that are off-path according to the limiting equilibrium distribution are not counterfactual, but will actually be played by young agents as “experiments,” so that equilibrium refinements can be derived from properties of optimal experimentation.