This chapter examines the role of beauty and desire in judgment – how eros both motivates and obstructs inquiry. It focuses on the Lydian and Babylonian narratives, both of which foreground the problem of beauty. Herodotus begins his narrative proper with his version of the Gyges and Candaules tale – which begins with the explicit statement that the “eyes are better than the ears,” that seeing is better than hearing – before problematizing this basic precept. Through this, Herodotus both kindles a desire within his audience to inquire, to look at what is not their own, and warns them of the difficulties of seeing clearly. This meditation on the aesthetic quality of judgment has serious political implications – for the despotism, in particular, impedes the attempt to see the beautiful clearly. This informs Herodotus’ praise of what he considers truly beautiful: the equality fostered by Babylonian marriage laws.

This concluding chapter synthesizes the volume’s findings on political discontent in Latin America, emphasizing that discontent stems not from sudden crises but from frustrated expectations born of prior social gains. The conclusion also highlights how discontent manifests through both “voice” (mobilization) and “exit” (migration, crime), and underscores the role of youth, gender, indigeneity, informality, and migration in shaping disaffection. The volume’s comparative lens, combining Sociology and Political Science, provides a nuanced framework to understand how social transformations and weak state capacity jointly fuel democratic dissatisfaction. Contrasting Latin America with the Global North, the chapter argues that discontent in the region arises from aspirations never fulfilled—not lost entitlements—and that relative deprivation will likely persist. The authors call for future research on media, the environment, and how social structures shape political agency, noting that current discontent has yet to crystallize into new political alignments.

Standard applications of psychology to addressing poverty involve the facilitation of decision-making orientations associated with flourishing, such as feeling high personal efficacy and regulating one’s behavior to fit long-term goals. Although such versions of agency and self-regulation may be helpful in Euro-American middle-class settings, their suitability is rarely considered for the kind of non-Western, nonaffluent settings in which the majority of the world’s population lives. In addressing this, we recommend analyzing how the accessibility and suitability of decision-making processes are shaped by the socioecological context in which decision-making takes place. Drawing on socioecological, cultural, and political psychology, we present a multilayered framework in which optimal decision-making mindsets are shaped by the material conditions, interpersonal relations, and societal discursive frames in which people are embedded. We illustrate the framework through the case study of migrant workers who caste marginalized in India, an emerging economy that is host to many behavioral anti-poverty efforts.

In this chapter, I investigate the problems of living in capitalistic societies and chart a pathway forward from a psychological perspective to overcome these problems. Economic inequality and the consequences emerging from the disproportionate political and social influence of the superrich, climate change, and neoliberal ideologies are leading problems in capitalistic societies. I argue that despite these serious problems, we should not abandon the economic system that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty, contributed to human innovation and striving, and improved the material lives of most of humanity. Instead, to overcome the problems of capitalism, I propose we should focus on creating more ethical economic systems that reap the joys of capitalism and reduce the sorrows. I draw on the world-making approach in psychology to help document problems, create alternative possibilities, and assess their impact, to create these gentler more humane forms of capitalism in the future.

This chapter defines political polarization and discusses its key features. We distinguish between different types of polarization, including affective (emotional-based) and ideological (ideas-based) polarization, and identify characteristic features of polarized societies: identity, subsumption, entrenchment, totality, existential threat, denigration of opponents, non-compromise, and the erosion of fairness, civility, and neutrality. We then present leading explanations for the dramatic rise in political polarization across the globe – rising inequality, globalization and working-class alienation, post-Cold-War conservative resurgence and reinforced liberalism, and the echo chamber effect of social media – and clarify how polarization relates to, yet differs from, populism and democratic backsliding. The chapter closes by presenting polarization’s harms and by foregrounding one such harm that structures the book’s argument: the drift of previously nonpartisan institutions (media, academia, religion, bureaucracy, courts) toward partisanship.

Compares those to whom the US government denies nonimmigrant visas to those it grants such visas in order to show how officers are more likely to deny visas to those who tell surveyors would not immigrate if they had the opportunity to do so whereas they are more likely to grant visas to those who told surveyors they would immigrate if they had an opportunity – contrary to what US immigration law ostensibly mandates visa officers to do. Officers are more likely to grant visas to those who possess indicators of what I define as (im)mobility capital. Such (im)mobility capital consists of only a subset of many measures of socioeconomic status and social ties, such as high levels of formal education, extensive travel experience, attendance at a selective school, and the number of years at their current job. The components I identified to comprise (im)mobility capital are also associated with whether a (non)immigrant visa applicant would be willing to spend more than half of the rest of their life in the country of destination if they had the opportunity. Adjudication about who to deny visas to by US visa officers is similar to how consulates of other countries operate.

Inequality in Russia skyrocketed in the 1990s. The wealthiest businesspeople became oligarchs while average Russians struggled to cover the cost of their basic needs. In this chapter, we examine the rise of inequality in post-communist Russia, and the role that social services – like healthcare, education, and pensions – played in socioeconomic well-being. We show that, with increasing inequality, the provision of social services suffered due to the government’s lack of capacity and finances. The 2010s was a period of rising oil prices and better economic performance. Inequality decreased in recent decades and the provision of social services dramatically improved. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, social policy has increasingly relied on cash payments, including to Russian men in the poorest regions who enlist to fight in Ukraine. At the same time, rising inflation, especially for food, hurts the most for those who are already the worst off.

This chapter expands the analysis of Great Decoupling and Jobless Growth to twenty-four major OECD economies, shifting from a sectoral to an aggregate and country-level perspective. While this aggregate approach provides a valuable macro-level overview, it risks obscuring the nuanced realities of these phenomena. Although Jobless Growth and the Great Decoupling appear widespread across OECD countries at the aggregate level, they arise from diverse and complex dynamics that vary significantly across sectors and regions. These divergent trends are rooted in different labour market, sectoral composition, human and physical capital endowments, and the broader socio-economic networks within which firms operate. The apparent homogeneity of these trends at the aggregate level masks a complex interplay of resource allocation, path dependency, and policy choices. Consequently, while triggered by common technological advancements and globalisation, Jobless Growth and the Great Decoupling will manifest differently across countries, necessitating tailored policy interventions.

My results about denial, deterrence, and disenchantment provide empirical support to how a push-retain-pull-repel model can help us understand why many remain ambivalent (im)mobile and never immigrate. I also review how my findings about each mechanism demonstrate how socioeconomic resources and social ties both facilitate and increase the costs of migration due to an interaction of immigration policy and social forces in society that incentivize individuals to establish stable ties to their society rather than migrate. This (im)mobility paradox makes international migration a far more difficult decision and unlikely event than many in migrant-destination countries perceive it to be. Finally, I reflect on how my data from the PIS the interaction of immigration policy and social forces stratifies potential immigrants who never immigrated due to deterrence, denial, and disenchantment into respectively an under-class, a lower class, and an upper class in the origin society, mirroring the stratification of immigrants through different pathways of assimilation in the migrant-destination society.

This chapter is a sort of an introduction to the book. The Chapter introduces and briefly explains some crucial topics and concepts: Jobless Growth, the Great Decoupling, the decline of the Labour Share. The treatment always relies on economic data from different countries. These arguments are related to the growing income inequality and to the idea of a New Great Transformation (which updates Polanyi’s corresponding theory).

The way B-visa applicants’ presentation of self to surveyors and officers in their visa interviews differs from those that are applying for other types of visas-like degree-seeking student visas, cultural exchange visas, and skilled worker visas, which are more frequently converted to immigrant visas. This is due to a provision in the immigration law statute–the dual-intent doctrine–that encourages US visa officers to evaluate immigrant intent more strictly with the former than the latter by not denying nonimmigrant visas to such latter applicants based on the likelihood that they will change their mind about immigrating after they arrive in the United States. Therefore, I show how B nonimmigrant visa (NIVs) applicants answer questions differently than all other nonimmigrant visa applicants about how they first came to go abroad, why they want to visit the United States rather than another country, what questions the visa officer asked them, and why or why not they would immigrate or not into the United States. (Im)mobility capital is not as important to demonstrate for those applying for such high-conversion visas as those with low-conversion visas due to the dual-intent doctrine.

Our understanding of international migration as a general phenomenon and in its various aspects is still limited to a relative deficiency in knowledge about a possibly even larger population of individuals that might have counterfactually immigrated but did not. This book examines the processes that prevent migration via the interaction between (a) specific government policies; and (b) societal forces emanating from the social networks in which potential immigrants are embedded. Additional data, empirical results, and theories about potential immigrants help us contribute three new theoretical frameworks to international migration: (1) the push-retain-pull-repel model, (2) the (im)mobility paradox, and (3) how might-have-been-immigrants who do not immigrate due to denial, deterrence, and disenchantment are stratified as unequally as immigrants are. Previous scholars have already discovered much about denial, deterrence, and disenchantment but no study has systematically and comparatively analyzed these three processes alongside each other. The outline of chapters for this book examines different aspects of denial, deterrence, and disenchantment.