In this chapter I describe how my interests in and commitment to developmental psychology grew in a multidimensional, discontinuous, nonlinear fashion. Prominent early personal, social, and intellectual influences included: coming of age in the 1960s, transitioning from fervent Catholicism to philosophy and science as my guiding stars through college and graduate school. I shape my story around the notion that “half of life is accident, and the other half is what one intentionally makes out of accident.” I began my work by focusing on the nature, causes and consequences of child maltreatment. Pursuing further research, practice, and policy interests, I conducted theory-informed longitudinal studies of the influence of risk factors (especially poverty and violence) on various dimensions of developmental processes and outcomes. More recently, I shifted focus to the design, conduct and analysis of randomized trials of school and/or neighborhood-based, social-emotional learning interventions, in the USA and then in conflict-and-crisis affected countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Creating and supporting collaborations with students, colleagues, and organizations has been critical throughout.

The introduction describes some of the key features and the wide range of actors and activities that characterise the workings of a long-distance bus station in Accra, Ghana’s capital. It then presents two meanings of hustle that capture the station’s workings: as a noun, describing crowded, hectic, and potentially confusing situations; and as a verb, denoting precarious yet venturesome economic activities. Building on the ambivalences evoked by the different uses and perspectives of the term, it situates the significance of this study in relation to scholarly discussions of transport work, the ‘informal economy’, (auto)mobility, infrastructure, and urban social life. It then outlines the diversity of functions and types of Ghanaian bus stations, and concludes with a reflection on methodology, highlighting the value of a single-sited ethnographic approach to urban complexity and trans-local mobility, and an itinerary of the book’s chapters.

We begin with the theoretical and empirical foundations of happiness economics, in which the aim of economic policy is to maximize self-reported happiness of people in society. We also discuss the economic correlates of self-reported happiness. We outline some of the key insights from the literature on behavioral industrial organization, such as phishing for phools and the effects of limited attention on the pricing decisions of firms. When products have several attributes, we explain how some might be more salient than others. We also explain the effects of limited attention on economic outcomes. We introduce the basics of complexity economics. Here, people use simple rules of thumb and simple adaptive learning models in the presence of true uncertainty. We show that the aggregate systemwide outcomes are complex, characterized by chaotic dynamics, and the formation of emergent phenomena. The observed fluctuations in the system arise endogenously, rather than from stochastic exogenous shocks. We introduce two kinds of learning models – reinforcement learning and beliefs-based learning. Finally, we critically evaluate the literature on competitive double auction experiments.

A short epilogue brings together the themes of the book, inviting us to look at the period not as a ‘Dark’ or ‘Golden Age’ but as a period of great complexity and transformation. As Gregory of Tours himself wrote: many things happened, both good and bad.

In this chapter we consider aspects of phonology for bimodal bilinguals, whose languages span distinct modalities (spoken/signed/written). As for other bilinguals, the primary issues concern the representation of the phonology for each language individually, ways that the phonological representations interact with each other (in grammar and in processing), and the development of the two phonologies, for children developing as simultaneous bilinguals or for learners of a second language in a second modality. Research on these topics has been sparse, and some have hardly been explored at all. Findings so far indicate that despite the modality difference between their two languages, phonological interactions still occur for bimodal bilinguals, providing crucial data for linguistic theories about the locus and mechanisms for such interactions, and important practical implications for language learners.

In the adjacent to Market Studies research stream, the emerging Market System Dynamics (MSD) tradition similarly studies how markets are constituted as complex social systems and how actors and institutions actively shape (and are shaped by) them. This chapter firstly provides an overview of the body of work that has accumulated within this tradition. Secondly, our chapter outlines five theoretical processes that highlight specific aspects of how markets are constituted as from an MSD lens. These processes include the (de)legitimation, the (de)moralization, the (de)politicization, the aestheticization, and the complexification of markets. We conclude this chapter by briefly discussing a set of biases within the MSD tradition (process inflation, enabling lens myopia, presentism, and particularism), and discuss how MSD and Market Studies as distinct research traditions might benefit from greater interaction.

At any moment in time, you can ride a bike with least effort by cycling in first gear. But if you want to ride around the block with least effort, first gear will not be ideal. By failing to distinguish between these two different situations, economists have recommended the worst possible climate change policy to governments. Contrary to their belief, emissions trading will achieve decarbonisation at maximum cost, and minimum speed.

Economics is not just about the allocation of scarce resources – how to ‘divide up the pie’. It is also about the creation of novelty, and the formation of new structures – how to make a pie in the first place. The new science of complexity, allied to old ideas of political economy, can help us understand how to create and change things quickly and at large scale. New economic thinking of this kind predicted the global financial crisis, but has barely begun to be applied to policy. It could transform the way we respond to climate change.

For much of its modern history, linguistics has taken an ontological stance on language as a structural entity, with a wide set of implications for how languages are understood as bounded entities. This is not about the different epistemological approaches to a structural version of language taken by various schools of linguistics, but about the basic ontological assumptions about what language is. A structural ontology made it possible to treat language as an object amenable to scientific study, enabling descriptions of languages around the world and facilitating many advances in our understandings of languages as structural entities. Yet this very tendency towards seeing languages as autonomous systems has enabled those forms of thinking that emphasize boundedness. When we contrast a structural ontology with a practice ontology, where the focus is on what people do with available linguistic resources, it becomes clear that in some of the recent translanguaging debates, people are talking about different things, language as structure and language as practice. Because structural and social (practice) language ontologies are so different, the debates about translanguaging have become mired in misunderstandings.

A summation of the main arguments of the book.

Systems approaches were an early part of the development of norms research as a subfield of International Relations but have been eclipsed by approaches which emphasise the role of actors, processes, and relationships. However, with new scholarship beginning to explore complex interactions of different norms and their relationship to the structure of the international system, the time to reassess existing systemic theories of international norms is now. This chapter traces the use of different types of systemic norms theory, including the norm life cycle, norms-as-structure, biological and ecological understandings of norm interaction and evolution, and complex systems theory (including regime complexes). By understanding international norms as emergent properties of a complex international system, we focus scholars’ attention on how the international system itself can affect the emergence, diffusion, contestation, and evolution of international norms and vice versa. The chapter finishes by employing a systems approach to understanding norm challenges regarding the rule of law.