Over the last twenty years, New Institutional Economics (NIE) has been a highly influential model in the study of the Greek and Roman economy. Although both its assumptions and methods are controversial, NIE approaches have changed the agenda of ancient economic history. The overall goal of neo-institutional economic history is to explain economic development, and notably growth, in line with a much-quoted phrase by the Nobel-prize winning economist Douglass North, that it is the task of economic history to explain the structure and performance of economies through time. NIE approaches and methods have therefore stimulated quite specific research directions in ancient economic history. This chapter suggests that NIE offers a fruitful conceptual matrix for asking new questions – with or without the answers necessarily staying within the NIE model. By contrast, the aim of the NIE method to predict and quantify outcomes, and the broader implications of the approach, are far more difficult to accept and defend. Particularly problematic is its commitment to certain kinds of growth as the desirable outcome of economic development, together with the assumption of the universal benefits of that growth, with its end point and golden standard explicitly or implicitly based on successful economies of the modern West.

This chapter examines budgeting in the United States, its budgetary institutions, culture, and policies, from the founding of the republic in the 1700s through the Trump administration. The US Constitution is the world’s oldest functioning government document, and its budgetary rules reflect the country’s ongoing debate about fiscal federalism, and how the federal goverment should manage its fiscal and macroeconomic policies.

Capabilities and Entitlements are distinct and free-standing, but also complementary ideas that inform each other.

This chapter interrogates the proper function of the law from a capabilities perspective. It argues that an application of the capabilities approach to understanding the law, especially constitutional law, is both normatively appropriate, and embedded in the realization of the capabilities approach’s goals. A recognized purpose of constitutions is to embed values, and entitlements commensurate with those values, into the foundational legal mechanisms of a country. Using examples from constitutions around the globe, the chapter shows concrete ways in which the capabilities approach finds expression in two ways suggested by Nussbaum: conceptions of citizen entitlements, and the interpretation of legal provisions. The chapter concludes by recognizing that viewing constitutions — both written and unwritten — from a capabilities approach is a vivid example of making visible the philosophic choices made by those who drafted the documents (where the discussion focusses on written constitutions), and those tasked with interpreting constitutional law in the context of people’s real, lived experiences. This approach to understanding the law is entirely consistent with the capability approach’s emphasis on an active role for government in providing the conditions that make real choices — about what to do and who to be — possible.

The first part of this chapter draws attention to the elements which show a concern for reciprocal entitlements and obligations in some works associated with Archbishop Wulfstan, arguing that these can more usefully be read as works of morality rather than as estate literature. The second part relates a little-studied remark in his ‘Sermon of the Wolf’ to a context of the proliferation of small lordships, bringing increased pressure on the local peasantry.