This chapter brings readers’ attention to the fact that throughout United States history, government has been an active and necessary part of building the country. In the colonial period, for example, laws regulating taverns and other businesses proliferated. After the Founding, under the leadership of Alexander Hamilton and the federalists, the central government was seen as the necessary force needed to support an economy that then enabled the country to participate on the world economic stage. The anti-federalists, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, aceded to the need for the government to support the economy in the ways proposed by the Federalists.

Bob Medearis, Roger Smith, and Bill Biggerstaff founded Silicon Valley Bank in 1983. Smith ran the Bank as a startup business in the first decade. Subsequent CEO John Dean restructured the Bank and Ken Wilcox redirected the Bank with a central focus on exclusively serving the tech community. Greg Becker accelerated the Bank, connecting its past to the future. The bank’s assets grew at a fast pace during the pandemic. Becker tripled the size of the bank between 2019 and 2022.

Apple Computer, Inc. released its “Think Different” campaign in 1997 to mark the return of Steve Jobs and to resurrect the struggling computer company. The Think Different campaign “got an audience that once thought of Apple as semi-cool, but semi-stupid to suddenly think about the brand in a whole new way.”1 Interestingly, be different is what Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) embraced and practiced from its beginning in 1983. The Bank distinguished itself from the crowded banking sector by serving entrepreneurs in the region since the early 1980s. At the time SVB was formed and officially named, “Silicon Valley” was considered unattractive for banking to capture the public attention and adopted the available moniker.

This chapter considers the Federalist Papers, an essay collection by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay under the pseudonym Publius and advocating for the ratification of the US Constitution starting in 1787. Beginning with reflections on the origins of the word essay and its many meanings, particular attention is given to one of these: the essay as an attempt to do something, either as an action or through writing. A central question guided the ratification debate: Could there be an essay – a concerted effort – striving toward just representation? In the passionate debates between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, a secondary, hidden debate was simmering: In what kind of prose should arguments be articulated? Was the essay, with its notoriously loose style and method, up to the task? In its ability to accommodate multiple, sometimes contradictory viewpoints in the same textual space, was it ideal for puzzling out the nation’s future? Or was it too distracted, a form of bad thought scribbled in haste, unsuited for such a momentous task? This chapter shows the correlative features of striving toward a political ideal and the striving involved in essayistic writing.

Between 20 and 40 per cent of plant species are at risk of extinction in the wild worldwide. Conservation translocation is an accepted strategy intended to ensure the conservation of a species in a natural context where it can undergo evolution, usually, but not exclusively, within its historical indigenous range. Because plants are sedentary, practitioners should take care to select an appropriate recipient site, consider the possibility of local adaptation, and choose source material from similar climatic and environmental conditions to the recipient site. As variation increases in a target species’ environment, practitioners should expect greater variation in seed dormancy and timing of germination, and take account of this in the monitoring plan. Prior to translocation, consider the focal species’ dependency on belowground mutualists (e.g. mycorrhizal fungi) and whether recipient sites have appropriate plant-pollinator networks. When selecting founder populations, use as large a founder size as feasible to increase the chance of establishment and survival, and consider the focal species’ life history when choosing propagule stage. If the biology of the focal species is poorly understood and key environmental drivers of translocation success are unknown, use experiments, predictive models, and multiple recipient sites to test hypotheses and improve translocation outcomes. Ensure that threats are known and abated before and after translocation, consider herbivore or predator exclusion, and create a management plan to maintain appropriate habitat conditions or disturbance regimens over the long term. Develop a detailed monitoring and data management plan to track translocated individuals and make sure to account for plant life history, vegetative dormancy, and the potential for lags in next generation seedling recruitment. Translocation success requires long-term commitment, financial and public support, and collaboration among conservation partners.

In contrast to the United States and, to a lesser extent, China, the United Kingdom’s listed company tech market is threadbare, notwithstanding the pipeline of growing, successful private companies.As part of a package to support entrepreneurs and innovation, relaxing the premium tier prohibition of dual-class stock could attract flotations on the London Stock Exchange by enabling founders to divest of equity and generate finance for growth while retaining the control essential to them in pursuing their long-term visions.Although regulators, and institutional investors, fear that dual-class stock incentivises public shareholder expropriation by controllers, evidence from other jurisdictions, especially the United States, does not corroborate those fears, and many exchanges, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Shanghai and India have recently determined that the benefits of dual-class stock outweigh the costs.However, evidence also suggests that existing dual-class firms are excessively discounted by the market, and the United Kingdom could, therefore, accrue a commercial advantage by reducing the cost of capital for dual-class firms through the judicious use of constraints.By tailoring those constraints carefully as proposed in this book, ‘founder without limits’ will not be feared, but will be seen as a critical piece of the jigsaw in boosting the British economy in uncertain times.

Almost all economists, left and right, love markets. Studies show that markets are more efficient than government because, in the private sector, managers and owners reap the rewards when they efficiently respond to consumer demand. The power of markets increases when, as in the modern world, the uses of resources have multiplied beyond measure.

Dedicated policy professionals are focused on improving their programs. Economists are more likely to also focus on opportunity cost, the damage to other programs when too many resources go to any single one. They are aware that “setting priorities” should not mean our top priority gets all the resources. In some absolute sense, safety is more important than recreation. But we should not abolish all youth baseball leagues, because a child is very rarely struck in the head by the ball.

Despite their frequent usefulness, economists place unbalanced emphasis on narrow self-interest as both compelling motive and route to happiness. Competing disciplines can lead to a deeper perspective. Positive psychology reminds us that friends and family lead to more happiness than wealth. That discipline focuses on admiration and elevation, as does the discipline of virtue ethics. These very different disciplines also agree on the importance of gratitude; it is both a virtue and a feature of the road to happiness. We should be grateful for our economy, which has led us to income per capita that is 25 times what it was in 1820. Liberty sparks our economic dynamism and is also at the heart of our constitutional democracy. In difficult times in particular, we should be grateful for our freedom.

In this chapter, we explore in detail two key corporate law concepts: the separate legal status of the corporation and limited liability. We discuss limitations and inroads into these concepts, as well as how the corporation—separate from the people who invest in or run it—can be liable in tort and criminal law.

The surviving evidence for Orthodox monasteries does not permit the same type of analysis of the place of monasteries within political and land-holding society as is possible for the Latin monasteries. The aim of this chapter is, instead, to provide an anatomy of Orthodox monasteries as institutions, using a variety of evidence including accounts by visitors and pilgrims and foundation documents. The emphasis is on giving as comprehensive as possible an analysis of how the Orthodox monasteries in the Holy Land functioned in terms of internal governance and discipline and relations with the state and external drivers.

This chapter, presenting the main theoretical statements on social evolution, stems from the hypothesis of a sudden rise of spoken, syntactic language in Northeast Africa, 70,000 years ago. The youth among a small population of Founders formed a cohesive group through the shared efforts of developing agreed-upon syntax and vocabulary, and then formed a community of roughly 150 persons to sustain their language. These were the initial social institutions. These institution led to creation of others, such as for ritual and migration, and enabled processes of social and institutional evolution: innovation (through representation or modeling as a source of variation), inheritance (through social reproduction and regulation), and the assessment of the fitness of institutions for the community. These processes brought into existence the Human System. At the multiple scales of family, community, and cross-community networks, it underwent coevolution among biological, social, cultural, and environmental influences, yielding a “group-level human nature” that relied on emotions at group as well as individual levels.

Expansion of the Human System began with divergence and migration of speaking communities in their homeland. Then, up to 45,000 years ago, migrants moved southwest across Africa and eastward along the Indian Ocean littoral, as documented through archaeology, genomics, and climate. Language evidence, supplemented by an accompanying website, confirms the value of Joseph H. Greenberg’s tradition of large-scale linguistic analysis. African migration included multiple settlements among preexisting hominin populations. The parallel migration into Asia, now identified genetically as a single migration, relied on watercraft at most stages. Surviving language groups indicate the path of migrants along the Indian Ocean littoral. Only after 45,000 years ago were migrants able to move northward, into the ecologically distinctive temperate zone. Once in the steppes, migrants moved east to Northeast Asia and west to the Black Sea. As networks facilitated exchange of dogs, religious ideas, bows and arrows, the Human System thus expanded from its initial locality to become a hemispheric network of communities in contact.

This chapter examines the various philosophies of education familiar to the Founders. Specifically, it traces the influence of classical theorists like Plato and Aristotle as well as Enlightenment thinkers including Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. It reveals the Founders’ unique synthesis of these two strands of thought. In addition, the chapter surveys the state of education in Colonial America. It recounts the context in which the Founders themselves were educated, and notes the effect this context had on Thomas Jefferson’s early advocacy for a more accessible educational system in Virginia.

Chapter 1 examines how ordinary antebellum Americans cherished the Constitution for enshrining their “free institutions” of freedom of speech, press, and religion as well as representative democracy and local self-government. Indeed, Americans boasted that the Constitution had given them a form of government that was superior to any other in the world. At the same time that they gloried in the Constitution, mid-nineteenth-century Americans were divided by the Constitution. Slavery, more than any other issue, drove the division. Except for a tiny group of radicals, antislavery Northerners believed the Constitution was either antislavery or at least neutral towards slave labor. Northern conservatives and some moderate Southerners held that the Constitution countenanced slavery and they accepted this as the price for a constitutional union of free states and slave states. Most white Southerners believed that the Constitution was avowedly proslavery. This three-way debate carried over to the lives and intentions of the Founders and the proper way to interpret their Constitution.Southerners believed that the Constitution was avowedly pro-slavery. This three-way debate carried over to the lives and intentions of the Founders and the proper way to interpret their Constitution.

John Dickinson (1732–1809) was a Founder of the United States whose jurisprudence was greatly influenced by Quakerism. Although he never joined the Religious Society of Friends, Dickinson adopted the basic tenets of their religion, particularly the belief in the Light of Christ in the conscience, which caused them to consider all people spiritually equal, regardless of gender, race, or socio-economic status. The strong and outspoken Quaker women in Dickinson’s life—his mother, wife, daughters, and a range of other female friends and relatives—influenced him to advocate for women in his legal practice and in his work to found the nation. Among the leading Founders, Dickinson was the only one to press for women’s rights, making him an early feminist.