This book explores the steady decline in the status of the individual in recent years and addresses common misunderstandings about the concept of individuality. Drawing from psychology, neuroscience, technology, economics, philosophy, politics, and law, White explains how and why the individual has been devalued in the eyes of scholars, government leaders, and the public. He notes that developments in science have led to doubts about our cognitive competence, while assumptions made in the humanities have led to questions about our moral competence. In this book, White goes on to argue that both of these views are mistaken and that they stem from overly simplistic ideas about how individuals make choices, however imperfectly, in their interests, which are multifaceted and complex. In response, he proposes a new way to look at individuals that preserves their essential autonomy while emphasizing their responsibility to others, inspired by the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant and the legal and political philosophy reflected in the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution. This book explains how individuality combines both rights and responsibilities, reconciles the popular yet false dichotomy between individual and society, and provides the basis for a humane and respectful civil society and government. This book is part of White's trilogy on the individual and society, which includes The Manipulation of Choice and The Illusion of Well-Being.

While Church attendance in the West is often cited as being in decline, it is argued that this applies primarily to the older established forms of Christianity. Other expressions of the faith are, in fact, stable or even growing. This volume provides multidisciplinary interpretations of and responses to one of the most complicated and controversial issues regarding the global transformation of Christianity today: the decline of "established Christianity" in the Western world. It also addresses the future of Christianity in the West after the decline. Drawing upon historical research, sociology, religious studies, philosophy and theology, an international panel of contributors provide new theoretical frameworks for understanding this decline and offer creative suggestions for responding to it. "Established Christianity" is conceptualized as historically, culturally, socially and politically embedded religion (with or without official established status). This is a dynamic volume that gives fresh perspective on one of the great social changes taking place in the West today. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of religious sociology, history and anthropology, as well as theologians.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

A crisis is coming for everyone who uses math and science. For decades now, the classical model of probability (the indifference principle and the Gaussian distribution) has been breaking down and revealing its limitations in fields from economics to epidemiology. Now a new approach has revealed the underlying non-classical principle behind all these 'anomalous' laws: — Pareto’s law of elite incomes — Zipf’s law of word frequencies — Lotka’s law of scientific publications — Kleiber’s law of metabolic rates — the Clausewitz-Dupuy law of combat friction — Moore’s law of computing costs — the Wright-Henderson cost law — Weibull’s law of electronics failures — the Flynn Effect in IQ scores — Benford’s law of digit frequencies — Farr’s law of epidemics — Hubbell’s neutral theory of biodiversity — Rogers’ law of innovation classes — Wilson’s law of island biogeography — Smeed’s law of traffic fatalities The general law behind all these particular laws (and countless others) is the "decline effect". As a system ages or grows in size, the rules of probability subtly change. Entropy increases, rare items become rarer, and average performance measures decline. The human meaning of a decline may be positive (decreasing costs, falling epidemic mortality) or negative (lower customer loyalty, decreasing efficiency), but the mathematical pattern is always the same. The implications are enormous, as these examples show: All epidemic diseases decline in infectiousness and in lethality. HIV-AIDS went from a highly infectious, 95-percent fatal disease, to a survivable condition with a latency of decades. COVID-19 went from a death rate of 7 percent in early 2020, to under 2 percent in 2022. Hereditary dynasties around the world declined smoothly in lifespan, from hundreds of years to tens of years. When democracies replaced monarchies, the decline (in spans of party control) continued.

In Southern Africa, marriage used to be widespread and common. However, over the past decades marriage rates have declined significantly. Julia Pauli explores the meaning of marriage when only few marry. Although marriage rates have dropped sharply, the value of weddings and marriages has not. To marry has become an indicator of upper-class status that less affluent people aspire to. Using the appropriation of marriage by a rural Namibian elite as a case study, the book tells the entwined stories of class formation and marriage decline in post-apartheid Namibia.

Individuals and systems are rife with prejudices, leading to discrimination and inequities. Examples of this include rejection of stigmatized groups (e.g., Black Americans, Indigenous people in Canada, Roma peoples in Europe), structural racism (e.g., inequitable distribution of resources for public schools), disenfranchisement of women employees (e.g., the “glass ceiling”), barriers to higher education (e.g., biased admissions requirements), heterosexism, economic oppression, and colonization. When we take a closer look, we find the core of the problem is imbalance in the distribution of power and its misuse.

The traditional (final or average salary) pension that employers have provided their employees has suffered a huge decline in labor force coverage in the United Kingdom and the United States, and less severe declines in Canada and elsewhere. The traditional pension provides a precious measure of retirement security by paying retirees an annuity for life. This study compares developments in the countries just named and in Australia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland to explain the forces behind the decline of the traditional pension and to contrast the experience of public sector employer-provided plans, where it remains dominant. Given the great value of the longevity insurance that the traditional plan provides, and the risks its diminished coverage entails, the book proposes a set of measures that either stem the decline or endow defined contribution pensions with some of the attributes of the traditional plan.

Latin America’s economic performance is mediocre at best, despite abundant natural resources and flourishing neighbors to the north. The perplexing question of how some of the wealthiest nations in the world in the nineteenth century are now the most crisis-prone has long puzzled economists and historians. The Decline of Latin American Economies examines the reality behind the struggling economies of Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. A distinguished panel of experts argues here that slow growth, rampant protectionism, and rising inflation plagued Latin America for years, where corrupt institutions and political unrest undermined the financial outlook of already besieged economies. Tracing Latin America’s growth and decline through two centuries, this volume illustrates how a once-prosperous continent now lags behind. Of interest to scholars and policymakers alike, it offers new insight into the relationship between political systems and economic development.

Topics covered include changes in the nature of work, rising health care expenditures, changing disability population, the American with Disabilities Act, social security disability insurance.