Now, more than ever, the world needs growth-oriented and socially inclusive policymaking. Is the world giving up on the promise of ever-greater prosperity for all, on functioning democratic institutions, and on long-term peace? Is the special set of circumstances that led to the recent rapid growth in emerging markets unlikely to be present in the future? Will the second decade of the twenty first century end with “secular stagnation”? Does the rise of authoritarianism, populism, and fanatic nihilism—all experienced over the last few years—threaten to unravel what has been built painstakingly since the catastrophe of World War II? Kemal Dervis addresses these and similar questions in this thought-provoking series of essays written for Project Syndicate from 2011 to 2015. The essays are organized in three sections: global economic interdependence, inequality and the political economy of reform, and the specific challenge of Europe. The common theme is the need for growth-oriented and socially inclusive policymaking in an interdependent world. These kinds of policies offer the potential for another wave of unprecedented human progress aided by breathtaking new technologies. However, a huge and destabilizing disruption is possible if policymaking is not globally cooperative and is not focused on inclusion and greater equity. These essays synthesize the experience and analysis of a scholar and policymaker with national, regional, and international experience at the highest levels. Dervis exhibits a passion for combining strongly held values with political feasibility.

Baier aims to make sense of Hume's Treatise as a whole. Hume’s family motto was “True to the End.” Baier argues that it is not until the end of the Treatise that we get his full story about “truth and falsehood, reason and folly.” By the end, we can see the cause to which Hume has been true throughout the work.

Kauffman's perspective on progress in America—from the point of view of those who lost—revives forgotten figures and reinvigorates dormant causes as he examines the characters and arguments from six critical battles that forever altered the American landscape: the debates over child labor, school consolidation, women's suffrage, the back-to-the-land movement, good roads and the Interstate Highway System, and a standing army. The integration of these subjects and the presentation of the anti-Progress case as a coherent political tendency encompassing several issues and many years is unprecedented. With wit, passion, and an arsenal of long-neglected sources, Kauffman measures the cost of progress in 20th-Century America and exposes the elaborate plans behind seemingly inevitable reforms. Kauffman brings to life such people and places as Ida Tarbell, the muckraker who thought that suffrage would ruin women; Onward, Indiana, the town that took up arms to defend its high school from death by consolidation; and the motley band of agrarian poets and ghetto dwellers who tried to stop the bulldozers that paved over America. He maintains that these forlorn causes—usually regarded as quaint, archaic, and hopeless—rested, in large part, upon quintessential American ideals: limited government, human-scale community, and family autonomy. The victory of progress has uprooted our citizens, swollen the central state at the expense of liberty, and sucked much of the life from what was once a nation of small communities.