This chapter turns again to David Potter, who argued compellingly that American exceptionalism emerged neither from a practical, nonideological political genius nor a prevailing faith in an inherited ideology, but rather from the influence of widespread and enduring economic abundance on the American character. Potter’s People of Plenty argued that the broad availability of abundance became the nation’s single most defining characteristic. Potter’s argument proved especially convincing during the broadly shared prosperity of the post-World War II years. Yet Potter’s explanation never quite accounted for the enduring postbellum poverty of the American South that lingered long enough for President Franklin Roosevelt to label the South the “nation’s no. 1 economic problem” in 1938. Additionally, as the nation’s economic growth slowed significantly and inequality worsened since 1980, there are new reasons to question whether Potter’s argument can remain influential if growing economic inequality and the related class anger persists or worsens.

In practice it often happens that forecasts from econometric models are manually adjusted. There can be good reasons for this. Foreseeable structural changes can be incorporated. Recent changes in data, in measurement or in the relevance of variables, can be addressed. A main issue with manual adjustment is that the end user of a forecast needs to know why someone modified a forecast and, next, how that forecast was changed. This should therefore be documented. We discuss an example to show that one may also need to know specific details of econometric models, here growth curves, to understand that even a seemingly harmless adjustment by a priori fixing the point of inflection leads to any result that you would like. In this chapter we discuss why people manually adjust forecasts. We discuss the optimal situation when it comes to adjustment and the experience with manual adjustment so far. A plea is made to consider model-based adjustment of model forecasts, thus allowing for a clear understanding of how and why adjustment was made.

This book concludes by reiterating the importance of avoiding grand narratives in research on sustainable development in international law. While each chapter revolves around its unique theme, my adoption of TWAIL helped unite these separate parts to tell a single story on Africa’s intersection with sustainable development’s legal evolution, conceptualisation, and implementation. Even so, this book is more than just writing about sustainable development or Africa as it deeply explores how international law should evolve, going forward. Finally, I end this book by drawing on TWAIL’s hopeful agenda by foreshadowing my future research interests in re-reading the law and politics of ecological crises as everyday occurrences and not as episodic events in international law.

What is a stress-related illness? And how does resilience protect us? Most of us are quite resilient against many of life’s stressors for most of our lifespans. So how does something as psychological as loneliness shorten our lives? And how does depression double the risk for death by heart disease? Some of the answers are found in the secrets to healthy aging. Just ask the centenarians.

Soldiers’ desires to craft a narrative out of the war experience encouraged them to look towards the future. This chapter focuses on another central feature of soldiers’ psychologies: their hope. Infantrymen invested themselves in visions of victorious peace, which supported their morale and encouraged resilience. Nonetheless, their hopes for peace changed over the course of the war. At the end of 1914 and 1916, soldiers remained confident that the next year’s campaigning would bring the war to a successful close. However, their experiences in 1917 left them uncertain that victory was even possible. Censors noted that men began considering the likelihood of a negotiated peace during this period. Nevertheless, the German offensives of 1918 restored men’s faith in victorious peace. Soldiers gleaned immense psychological benefits from their investment in a peaceful future. Hope was a coping mechanism fed by memories, dreams, and fantasies that provided a vision of an alternative world devoid of war: something the men could fight for. Infantrymen developed personal life goals, which instilled their service with a depth of meaning that was itself sustaining. A variety of things fuelled their hope and optimistic reasoning: religion, prisoners, war souvenirs, and rumour all fed hope. Significantly, too, most of these soldiers believed that the German state had to be defeated were there ever to be a lasting peace. More subtle psychological mechanisms were also essential: optimism, certainty, language, acculturation, and the sense of success. So long as men were able to conceive of the war as just, necessary, and winnable they were generally willing to endure the stresses of service.

This chapter recounts the history, context, and significance of Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 film adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Whereas films from theatrical or operatic sources tend to distance themselves from stage artifice, Bergman’s production emphasizes and revels in it. In doing so, it also comments on and, in some ways, turns from the work for which he is best known, celebrated and, sometimes, excoriated. The Enlightenment optimism of Mozart’s text provides a sharp contrast to Bergman’s brand of anxious, often agonized high modernism. It also provides a foil, both heartening and convincing, to the direness so often evident in 1970s cinema, and in the life and discourse surrounding it.

This chapter summarizes an optimistic perspective of the progress that has been made and what is known about suicide, while highlighting the questions that remain. We point out that many traditional understandings of suicide focus on risk factors, problems, and deficits and suggest there may be a role of more positive constructs, such as resilience, optimism, hope, gratitude, and others. We discuss the potential role of resilience – at the individual, community, and societal levels – in reducing suicide, and how positive psychology can inform suicide prevention efforts. Interventions to build psychological capital, resilience, personal strengths, or community empowerment may be beneficial. Indeed, positive suicidology, and even critical suicidology to a certain extent, attempt to incorporate these aspects.

The book concludes on a positive and action-oriented note. We highlight the role of hope in our society and how it can benefit suicide prevention efforts. The chapter summarizes how the book has accomplished three aims: (1) providing a biopsychosocial perspective on suicide and prevention, (2) serving as a public health intervention by increasing awareness, de-bunking myths, and destigmatizing suicide, and (3) helping readers shift to a perspective of hope and optimism. Capitalizing on this optimism, the chapter then focuses on increasing agency and offering concrete action steps, such that the reader feels they can be part of suicide prevention.

Optimism is belief in a brighter future. In this chapter you will learn how optimistic people think and what they do. Optimists acknowledge the challenges they face but focus on what they can do to change their situation. You will read of how people we interviewed remained optimistic in very challenging situations. We share four ways to build optimism: shifting your attention to focus on things within your immediate control, savoring positive events, staying active, and challenging negative thoughts that are neither helpful nor realistic.

Youth citizenship manifests in complex, contentious ways, as youth continuously negotiate the meaning of citizenship through actions and relations with peers and elders. Citizenship plays out through lived experiences, ranging from the police encounters, to the sociality of voting, to carework for a neighbor. Income, church attendance, gender identity, and country context shape these experiences, leading everyday citizenship to vary widely. Extending the book’s lessons to other marginalized populations through survey data on rural youth in Ghana, Tanzania, and Uganda, we discover that, in comparison to urban youth, significantly more rural youth attend community activities, vote, and advocate, though they are less legalistic. We urge future research on how these patterns play out through localized words and deeds. In conclusion, despite the severe constraints of economic inequality, gerontocracy, patriarchy, repression, and corruption that many African urban youth face, youth are agentic, creative, and eager to lead their communities and countries.

This brief introduction outlines the book to follow, which will cover both core creativity scholarship and how the construct is linked to positive outcomes. The purpose of the present book is to offer an array of benefits related to creativity in order to help articulate the specific value of promoting, nurturing, and investing in creativity. The five components of the Creativity Advantage model are introduced for the first time: self-insight, healing, connection, drive, and legacy.

Career wellbeing is one of the major differentiators that helps people live into their 90s. Planning for the future. When plans don’t plan out the way you hope, though, that’s when you turn the page and make a new list. Developed Bob’s Red Mill, Healthy Foods. There are great benefits of keeping working. Important to help others. Search for something important to you, something you believe in. Even after significant setbacks and losses, keep believing. Never give up.

The Aeneid is qualifiedly Augustan. It does not suppress the problems of Augustus’ rise. It foregrounds human tragedy within the range of events in suspension, fortunae, though these cannot impede providential World Fate. Dido and Turnus make choices against fate that are up to them; the fact of fate’s providence makes these and other tragedies even more cruel. Virgil combines the Stoic concept of cosmic fate with the contemporary view that the Roman empire was coterminous with the inhabited world, and he innovatively adds that Rome’s universal fate is Stoically providential. He complicates that model with his emphasis on the human tragedy involved in Rome’s establishment. Rather than being Augustan or anti-Augustan, the Aeneid is realistic in its acceptance of the problems of Augustus’ rise and guardedly optimistic chiefly because of Virgil’s independent didacticism for Augustus. He presents as exempla for Augustus Hercules and Aeneas, though the latter’s defective inclemency to Turnus is meant to encourage Augustus’ well-advertised exercise of clemency. Anchises’ words at Aeneid 6.851–3 have a special didactic application to Augustus: ‘tu regere imperio .... memento’.

If Aristotle understood virtue (aretē) to refer to the realization of a potential capacity or telos, then how might we understand the world to reach its virtuous potential? What might it mean to view our own global present as not an apex but as a passing stage within a broader process of worlding? Understanding the world as a live entity that perpetually worlds its way into new actualizations -- manifesting the dynamic capacities, potential, and striving of “virtue” -- this chapter turns to Shakespeare as a source for alternative models of world that awaken us to its inherent potentiality. For example, in As You Like It, the condition of exile unlocks a paradigm of seeing otherwise -- and often optimistically -- that runs throughout the play, enabling characters to form new bonds that serve as the basis for individual and communal flourishing. I examine the extent to which the play’s new community of relationships makes a place for nonhuman animals as well as for the pessimism and self-exile of Jaques. Such models enable us to not only see around and beyond the realities of our globalized world but also to perceive alternative formulations of world as already present and alive in the world we live in.