This chapter begins by applying the theory of the firm to the context of a medical practice. The concepts of profit maximization, inputs to production, and outputs from production are all applied to this example. Then the chapter moves on to discuss sources of efficiency in production and specific applications to medical care production. The chapter then develops the basics of supply curves, and how they are interpreted and used, and then brings supply together with demand to describe the basics of equilibrium in an efficient market. The last part of the chapter discusses threats to efficiency in markets, giving a brief overview of the largest sources of difficulty in applying efficient markets to the healthcare context. This sets up the rest of the book: the healthcare sector is filled with problems that make efficient markets unlikely, meaning that understanding the underlying economics is vital.

The population of Czarist Russia roughly tripled between 1850 and 1914. Keynes conjectured that this “excessive fecundity” contributed to the revolutions of 1917–18. In Russia as in contemporary India, however, population grew largely because the growing railroad network alleviated local famine. The growth and routing of the railways were determined chiefly by military considerations, hence can be regarded as exogenous. The railroads also allowed the opening of new lands and greater regional and national specialization: Russian grain exports quintupled between 1850 and 1914, foreign investment poured in, and millions of peasants moved temporarily into urban industry during months of slack farmstead demand. Hence a population explosion that would ordinarily have reduced wages and living standards was instead accompanied by rapid economic growth, per capita income almost tripling in the sixty years before 1914. The regions not serviced by railways, however, stagnated or declined; and, controlling for other factors, regional railway access correlates negatively with peasant unrest. Not rapidly growing population, but uneven development, appears most associated with rebellion.

Alpine grassland and nival zones are characterized by variable environmental conditions, compressed breeding seasons, and limited resources such as food and nest site availability. As a result, high elevation habitats around the world contain an impressive diversity of unique bird species, highly specialized to thrive in challenging environmental conditions with limited breeding opportunities. In this chapter, we highlight the global diversity of alpine habitats and avifaunal communities. We first define general features of alpine and nival zones, before providing an overview of these habitats across 10 major regions around the world. Assembling a global list of alpine breeding birds, we then summarize what makes alpine avifauna unique and how communities vary regionally. Specifically, we focus on traits that characterize how species interact with their environment: i) alpine specialization and endemism, ii) nesting strategies, and iii) migration behaviour. Finally, we address some of the main eco-evolutionary drivers that shape these alpine communities, including climate, vegetation structure, food availability, and species interactions. We conclude by discussing the critical role snow dynamics play in maintaining many alpine bird communities and highlight the concerning trends associated with a rapidly changing climate that are putting pressure on alpine birds.

This chapter narrates the beginning of an international dispute. In Paris, we meet Filibert N’Diaye, a senior associate at Burnham & Hutz LLP, and his boss, law firm partner Lionel Blum, as they receive the mandate to represent a state before the ICJ. The newly-formed legal team is trying to develop a persuasive litigation strategy and to manage its delicate relationship with the client. Meanwhile, the chapter reflects on the profound transformations of the global legal services market in the last few decades. Yesteryear’s international litigators were an élite club of white Western men, who came to international law late in their careers and handled only a few disputes at a time. In recent years, many multinational law firms have established dedicated practice areas in the world’s dispute settlement capitals. The creation of a specialized ‘bar’ around each international court fostered the mutual acquaintance between counsel and the bench, thereby deeply affecting the substance, tone, and ethos of international litigation.

Modern science is systematic inquiry, not systematic knowledge. It cannot be defined by its method or by its metaphysics, since these are amended as inquiry progresses. The norms of science are therefore the business of science and represent empirical discoveries. Peirce’s conception of science is nontechnical and for that reason difficult: he identified it by its ’spirit’, a restless quest for concrete discovery fruitful of further discovery. Theory, then, is no longer the end of inquiry, a resting place, but is, instead, a means to further discovery. Whereas philosophical systems were meant to be coherent and comprehensive, a theory that grounds research cannot be complete and any incoherence in it is a stimulus, not a fatal flaw. But the pursuit of concrete knowledge requires specialization and an evolving network of specialists. Peirce reversed the usual deprecation of specialization: its aim is growth of a knowledge that transcends any individual consciousness.

Psychologists often specialize within the field. In doing so, they may undergo a voluntary examination process in a specialty area. Psychology recognizes specialty areas including: Behavioral and Cognitive Psychology, Child and Adolescent Psychology, Clinical Neuropsychology and its subspecialty Pediatric Neuropsychology, Clinical Psychology, Clinical Psychopharmacology, Counseling Psychology, Couple and Family Psychology, Forensic Psychology, Geropsychology, Group Psychology, Organizational and Business Consulting Psychology, Police and Public Safety Psychology, Psychoanalysis in Psychology, Rehabilitation Psychology, School Psychology, Serious Mental Illness Psychology, Sleep Psychology. Each requires training in the Foundational and Functional psychology competencies, yet also requires additional focused training (mostly post-doctoral) in the specialty area. Although this is a voluntary process, an increasing number of institutions such as hospitals, medical centers, and academic settings are encouraging board certification for privileges. This chapter describes the process of becoming board certified in a specialty through the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP).

The Greek world from ca. 750 onwards saw the establishment of wealthy elites, the widespread use of chattel and other slaves, and the occupation of new territories across the Mediterranean, all of which laid the groundwork for later developments. Elite property owners exploited the labour of the free poor, thereby adding to their own surpluses while keeping levels of consumption in the wider community minimal and archaeologically invisible. Only when and where social unrest or outright civil war led to restrictions on exploitation, and when new trading opportunities emerged around 600, did a middling class begin to establish itself, and to create demand for a range of staples that they could not produce themselves. In the late sixth century, the economic and social structure of the classical Greek world took shape, as regional and local specialisation and trade networks reached a level that enabled significant – if unquantifiable – per capita growth. Not all parts of the Greek world shared equally in these developments. Sparta, Crete, and Thessaly retained a polarised social structure of leisured elite and slave workers and continued to aim at agricultural self-sufficiency, institutionalising key features of the old predatory regimes that other Greeks were leaving behind.

This chapter describes broad regional and temporal trends in the evolution of international trade and international factor flows between 1700 and 1870, including key differences in trade costs across space and time. We find trade links in western Europe and the European colonies of North America intensified at the same time these regions experienced the initial Industrial Revolution and the spread of industrialization, which led to sustained economic growth. At the same time, global differences in specialization and income emerged. To understand the contribution of global market forces as well as colonialism to these differences, the chapter lays out theoretical reasons for links between trade and economic growth and examines related historical arguments and evidence. We conclude that trade contributed to global divergence, but the magnitude and mechanisms through which trade affected global welfare lies not so much in the direct impact of trade and specialization as in multiplier effects emerging from the interactions of trade with other factors that affect economic development.

In a liberal political regime, individuals are accorded a basic right to private autonomy. Individuals are assumed to be the best judges of their own interests in most contexts, under appropriate conditions of rationality. They can thus enter into legal relationships with others and shape the content of those relationships in the form of specific rights and obligations. Private autonomy supports the recognition of the right to arbitration. Private parties should be entitled to opt for arbitration to settle controversies involving their own interests. Arbitration, moreover, offers potential advantages over litigation in court, having to do with specialization and expertise, procedural flexibility, speed, privacy and confidentiality. Arbitration is grounded in private autonomy, not on utilitarian considerations. The right to arbitration is not absolute, of course. The state is authorized to place restrictions on it, in the name of public interests and values. But the state bears a burden of justification.

State-to-state arbitration offers some potential advantages as a dispute-resolution mechanism. These advantages are similar to those arbitration displays in other settings, having to do with specialization, procedural flexibility, speed, and confidentiality. The chapter examines some of the strengths and weaknesses of state-to-state arbitration. It also discusses the arbitrability of peremptory norms of international law (ius cogens), the interaction between arbitrators and the International Court of Justice in the lawmaking process, and the extent to which arbitration is likely to be avoided as a procedure to settle disputes among member states of a supranational organization.

The early Republican period in Chinese history witnessed the emergence of a new generation of academic professionals. These new professional historians criticized the centrality of ancient historical time in Chinese historical studies. In contrast, they embraced objectivity as a goal of historical practice and regarded intellectual autonomy as integral to the discipline. With the shift in focus of historical studies, in the 1920s, some new academic professionals carved out a niche for themselves by developing world history into a specific teaching field. By the early 1930s, world historians such as Lei Haizong dedicated themselves to placing China’s past and future within a world-historical context. This chapter contends that the pursuit of intellectual autonomy was, however, interrupted by the war with Japan. At this moment of crisis, world historians exemplified by Lei Haizong became increasingly nationalistic. These historians glorified the unique nature of Chinese culture to promote national identity at a moment of crisis. As a result, a binary opposition between China and the world gradually emerged in Chinese historiography.

Contrary to orthodox views, Sparta’s full citizens, the Spartiates, were not professional or specialized full-time soldiers and, apart from practice in elementary drill, their training focused mainly on physical fitness. In so far as Sparta’s armies excelled in technical proficiency, it was through their tight-knit organization and hierarchical command structures and their methodical, if often inflexible, implementation of set manoeuvres.

This chapter aims to establish a lower limit to the possible extent of horizontal specialization in the economy of classical Athens; in other words, the minimum plausible number of specialized jobs to do with production, exchange, and services. This exercise shows that even with a mindset sceptical to the idea of specialization, there cannot realistically have been fewer than 162 specialized full-time occupations in classical Attica. This demonstrates the complexity and dynamism of the classical Athenian economy.

This chapter concerns Roman sculptors and considers whether sculptors in the Roman empire fit the modern criteria for the term ‘professional’, as has been developed in the sociology of modern professions. While the lack of a regulatory system governing stone carving practitioners in the Roman world might make it hard to fit them into most modern definitions of professionals, it is argued that Roman sculptors saw their work as skilled and used their specialist knowledge to obtain social and economic rewards.

Niche construction theory, popular in evolutionary biology, can help us understand the lag between economic growth and political reform in highly interconnected states, where competition for resources drives adaptation via the selection of strategic opportunities, ranging from the predatory and parasitical to the symbiotic. A rugged or smooth fitness landscape, created by the system’s topology, determines how a society makes choices on the path toward its own fitness peak. No two societies will start from the same point or follow the same path to its local or global optimum. This makes it difficult to simply transfer strategies, norms, or institutions across cultures. Evolutionary social psychology (ESP) teaches that individuals and societies alike exhibit bounded rationality, practice heuristics, and imitate local models and cultures they know. ESP may also help explain why China’s developmental experience can be a more familiar starting point than a Western alternative, and more easily copied by other emerging nations. Nevertheless, disordered activity may keep the overall global system in balance.

The fourth chapter follows the ramifications of this investment in a Platonizing imagination of learning and knowledge into the discipline of philology, showing how such a template interacted with the tensions inherent in philology as a practice. If it is the case that the demands of an increasingly specialized scientific philology and the expectation of a fully personal and individualized formation of the self (Bildung) were increasingly drifting apart, I want to show that philology in its self-descriptions still tried to keep those poles together, especially through maintaining a rhetoric of philological feeling. The authors this chapter focuses on are Friedrich Creuzer, Friedrich Thiersch, August Boeckh, Friedrich Ritschl, and Hermann Usener.