How should we evaluate the ethics of procreation, especially the environmental consequences of reproductive decisions on future generations, in a resource-constrained world? While demographers, moral philosophers, and environmental scientists have separately discussed the implications of population size for sustainability, no one has attempted to synthesize the concerns and values of these approaches. The culmination of a half century of engagement with population ethics, Partha Dasgupta’s masterful Time and the Generations blends economics, philosophy, and ecology to offer an original lens on the difficult topic of optimum global population. After offering careful attention to global inequality and the imbalance of power between men and women, Dasgupta provides tentative answers to two fundamental questions: What level of economic activity can our planet support over the long run, and what does the answer say about optimum population numbers? He develops a population ethics that can be used to evaluate our choices and guide our sense of a sustainable global population and living standards. Structured around a central essay from Dasgupta, the book also features a foreword from Robert Solow; correspondence with Kenneth Arrow; incisive commentaries from Joseph Stiglitz, Eric Maskin, and Scott Barrett; an extended response by the author to them; and a joint paper with Aisha Dasgupta on inequalities in reproductive decisions and the idea of reproductive rights. Taken together, Time and the Generations represents a fascinating dialogue between world-renowned economists on a central issue of our time.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Discover the game-changing theory of the cycles of history and what past generations can teach us about living through times of upheaval—with deep insights into the roles that Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials have to play—now with a new preface by Neil Howe. First comes a High, a period of confident expansion. Next comes an Awakening, a time of spiritual exploration and rebellion. Then comes an Unraveling, in which individualism triumphs over crumbling institutions. Last comes a Crisis—the Fourth Turning—when society passes through a great and perilous gate in history. William Strauss and Neil Howe will change the way you see the world—and your place in it. With blazing originality, The Fourth Turning illuminates the past, explains the present, and reimagines the future. Most remarkably, it offers an utterly persuasive prophecy about how America’s past will predict what comes next. Strauss and Howe base this vision on a provocative theory of American history. The authors look back five hundred years and uncover a distinct pattern: Modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting about the length of a long human life, each composed of four twenty-year eras—or “turnings”—that comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and rebirth. Illustrating this cycle through a brilliant analysis of the post–World War II period, The Fourth Turning offers bold predictions about how all of us can prepare, individually and collectively, for this rendezvous with destiny.

Generations: The Time Machine in Theory and Practice challenges the fragmented and diverse use of the concept of generation commonly found in the social sciences. It approaches the concept in a manner that stretches the sociological imagination away from its orientation toward the present by building the concept of the passage of time into our understanding of the social. It proposes an innovative and exciting view of the field of generations, lifting it out from life course and cohort analysis, and reconstituting the area with fresh and dynamic ways of seeing. With its unique, intellectually innovative and sustained critical study of generational work, Generations will appeal to scholars across a range of social sciences and humanities, and will be of particular interest to social theorists and anthropologists, as well as sociologists of social history, consumption, identity and culture.

The book presents a powerful reminder of adults' responsibility for the development of long-term attention (and thus of maturity) in children, particularly in the face of the techniques of attention-destruction practiced by the programming industries.

This edited book draws from work that focuses on the act of telling family stories, as well as their content and structure. The process of telling family stories is linked to central aspects of development, including language acquisition, affect regulation, and family interaction patterns. This book extends across traditional developmental psychology, personality theory, and family studies. Drawing broadly on the epigenetic framework for individual development articulated by Erik Erikson, as well as on conceptions of the family life cycle, the editors bring together contemporary examples of psychological research on family stories and their implications for development and change at different points in the life course. The book is divided into sections that focus on family stories at different points in the life cycle, from early childhood and the beginnings of narrative skill, through adolescence, young adulthood, midlife, and then mature adulthood and its intergenerational meaning. During each of these periods of the life cycle, research focusing on individual development within an Eriksonian framework of ego strengths and virtues is highlighted. The dynamic role of family stories is also featured here, with work exploring the links between family process, intergenerational attachment, and storytelling. Sociocultural theories that emphasize how such development is situated in the wider cultural context are also featured in several chapters. This broad lifespan developmental focus serves to integrate the exciting diversity of this work and foster further questions and research in the emerging field of family narrative. The book is intended primarily for researchers and advanced-level students in the fields of developmental and personality psychology, as well as those in family studies and in gerontology. It may also be of interest to those in the helping professions who are concerned with family therapy and family issues, and may--due to its content and illustrative material--have appeal to a wider market of the lay public. The chapters are written in a readily accessible style and the analyses are presented in a fairly non-technical way. Because family stories are charted across the lifespan, it would be a suitable companion book to a more traditional lifespan textbook in certain courses.

Hailed by national leaders as politically diverse as former Vice President Al Gore and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Generations has been heralded by reviewers as a brilliant, if somewhat unsettling, reassessment of where America is heading. William Strauss and Neil Howe posit the history of America as a succession of generational biographies, beginning in 1584 and encompassing every-one through the children of today. Their bold theory is that each generation belongs to one of four types, and that these types repeat sequentially in a fixed pattern. The vision of Generations allows us to plot a recurring cycle in American history -- a cycle of spiritual awakenings and secular crises -- from the founding colonists through the present day and well into this millenium. Generations is at once a refreshing historical narrative and a thrilling intuitive leap that reorders not only our history books but also our expectations for the twenty-first century.

A groundbreaking study in colonial history, this book gives a remarkably detailed picture of life in an early American community. It focuses on three basic and interrelated subjects largely neglected by historians—population, land, and the family—as they affected the lives of four successive generations. Applying demographic methods to historical research, Professor Greven presents new and unexpected evidence about the most basic aspects of family life in colonial America, and shows how these characteristics changed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.