Books published by The University of Chicago Press

A comparative analysis of both formal and informal long-term care in ten of the world's wealthiest countries. Nations throughout the world are in the midst of an enormous demographic transition, with life expectancy increasing and fertility falling, leading to a rapidly aging population and critical implications for long-term care around the world. This volume documents and compares long-term care programs in ten wealthy countries. Analyses of survey data and government statistics show that the costs of long-term care are beyond the financial means of a large fraction of the elderly population in most countries, particularly the oldest and most disabled. As a result, public systems bear most of the cost of formal long-term care, such as care in an institution or paid home care. Most countries spend more on nursing homes than on home care, but this relationship varies widely as does the mix of care needs and resources used to define eligibility for public funding. At the same time, most care is provided informally through family or unpaid caregivers. The costs of informal care, including the foregone earnings of caregivers, are estimated to account for at least one-third of all long-term care spending in every country. Thus, any estimate of the social costs of long-term care must account for the implicit costs of informal care.

Provides strategies and approaches for integrating natural capital into environmental statistics. While the importance of natural resources and the contributions of the environment to welfare are apparent, traditional national income and wealth accounting practices do not measure or value environmental public goods. This volume examines the conceptual and empirical basis for integrating natural capital-forests, oceans, and air-into the economic and environmental statistics that inform public policy. It offers innovative approaches to valuing nonmarket environmental goods and services, including strategies for capturing heterogeneity in measurement across types of capital, geography, and individuals. The chapters focus on measuring productivity with adjustments for pollution damage, developing a microdata infrastructure to advance our understanding of the distribution of environmental amenities and hazards, and estimating long-run sustainable development indicators. Case studies consider coastal assets, forests, and marine ecosystems, and develop strategies for implementing specific environmental-economic accounts such as environmental activity accounts and natural capital accounts for forests and the marine economy. As national income accounting standards are updated to incorporate expanded guidance on issues related to natural capital, this timely book will help inform decisions on the measurement and treatment of climate, air, water, and other public goods.

Blending travelogue and philosophical reflection, Van Horn embarks on a quest for a new urban land ethic that reveals how urban animals can expand how we care for and understand place. A hiking trail through majestic mountains. A raw, unpeopled wilderness stretching as far as the eye can see. These are the settings we associate with our most famous books about nature. But Gavin Van Horn isn't most nature writers. He lives and works not in some perfectly remote cabin in the woods but in a city-a big city. And that city has offered him something even more valuable than solitude: a window onto the surprising attractiveness of cities to animals. What was once in his mind essentially a nature-free blank slate turns out to actually be a bustling place where millions of wild things roam. He came to realize that our own paths are crisscrossed by the tracks and flyways of endangered black-crowned night herons, Cooper's hawks, brown bats, coyotes, opossums, white-tailed deer, and many others who thread their lives ably through our own.             With The Way of Coyote, Gavin Van Horn reveals the stupendous diversity of species that can flourish in urban landscapes like Chicago. That isn't to say city living is without its challenges. Chicago has been altered dramatically over a relatively short timespan-its soils covered by concrete, its wetlands drained and refilled, its river diverted and made to flow in the opposite direction. The stories in The Way of Coyote occasionally lament lost abundance, but they also point toward incredible adaptability and resilience, such as that displayed by beavers plying the waters of human-constructed canals or peregrine falcons raising their young atop towering skyscrapers. Van Horn populates his stories with a remarkable range of urban wildlife and probes the philosophical and religious dimensions of what it means to coexist, drawing frequently from the wisdom of three unconventional guides-wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold, Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu, and the North American trickster figure Coyote. Ultimately, Van Horn sees vast potential for a more vibrant collective of ecological citizens as we take our cues from landscapes past and present. Part urban nature travelogue, part philosophical reflection on the role wildlife can play in waking us to a shared sense of place and fate, The Way of Coyote is a deeply personal journey that questions how we might best reconcile our own needs with the needs of other creatures in our shared urban habitats.

An incisive history of early American archaeology-from reckless looting to professional science-and the field's unfinished efforts to make amends today, told "with passion, indignation, and a dash of suspense" (New York Times). American archaeology was forever scarred by an 1893 business proposition between cowboy-turned-excavator Richard Wetherill and socialites-turned-antiquarians Fred and Talbot Hyde. Wetherill had stumbled upon Mesa Verde's spectacular cliff dwellings and started selling artifacts, but with the Hydes' money behind him, well-there's no telling what they might discover. Thus begins the Hyde Exploring Expedition, a nine-year venture into Utah's Grand Gulch and New Mexico's Chaco Canyon that-coupled with other less-restrained looters-so devastates Indigenous cultural sites across the American Southwest that Congress passes first-of-their-kind regulations to stop the carnage. As the money dries up, tensions rise, and a once-profitable enterprise disintegrates, setting the stage for a tragic murder. Sins of the Shovel is a story of adventure and business gone wrong and how archaeologists today grapple with this complex heritage. Through the story of the Hyde Exploring Expedition, practicing archaeologist Rachel Morgan uncovers the uncomfortable links between commodity culture, contemporary ethics, and the broader political forces that perpetuate destructive behavior today. The result is an unsparing and even-handed assessment of American archaeology's sins, past and present, and how the field is working toward atonement.

An incisive exploration of Nietzsche as a bold, visionary poet-philosopher.   Today, Nietzsche is justly celebrated for his rich, philosophical naturalism, but Keith Ansell-Pearson warns that we must not overlook the visionary dimension of his thinking and his focus on the need to cultivate a new care of the self and care of life. In Nietzsche's Earthbound Wisdom, Ansell-Pearson recovers Nietzsche's love for a philosophy that guides us through our passions, one that opens us more fully to the possibilities of life and the joy of knowledge. Ansell-Pearson offers close readings of Nietzsche's texts in conversation with philosophical and literary figures including Augustine, Baudelaire, Carlyle, Dostoevsky, Emerson, Flaubert, Stendhal, and more. Throughout, Ansell-Pearson examines Nietzsche's sophisticated critique of literary naturalism and his alternative conception of the poet as a seer who has a deep longing for a new earth.

A new edition of a classic resource-comprised of twenty-three essays written specifically for this volume. First published nearly thirty years ago, Critical Terms for Religious Studies proved a vital resource for an emerging interdisciplinary conversation. We still use much of the same language in the study of religion, but fresh concerns have both changed their meaning and given rise to new terms altogether. This edition consists of twenty-three entirely new essays that offer students and scholars alike the tools to historicize and evaluate the shifting role of familiar and emerging critical terms in religious studies.            These are "critical terms" both because they are important in our cultural moment-identity, race, sex, catastrophe, power, and money-and because thinking through them reveals how religions are embedded in and shaped by material, social, economic, and political forces. A shared conviction unites contributors from a range of traditions and methodologies: a recognition that our world is saturated by the persistence of religious traditions as shape-shifting (not static or transcendent) forces of authority, as powerful today as ever before.

A wide-ranging collection of essays that centers Latinos in the history of American cities and suburbs.   Latino urban history has been underappreciated not only in its own right but for the centrality of its narratives to urban history as a field. A scholarly discipline that has long scrutinized economics, politics, and the built environment has too often framed race as literally Black and white. This has resulted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the full social canvas of American cities since at least the early twentieth century.   Traversing cities like Atlanta, Chicago, El Paso, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, this collection of essays brings together both established and emerging scholars, including long-time urbanists and academics working in the fields of Latino, borderlands, political, landscape, and religious history. Organized at different scales-including city, suburb, neighborhood, and hemisphere-this impressive body of work disrupts long-standing narratives about metropolitan America. The contributors-Llana Barber, Mauricio Castro, Eduardo Contreras, Sandra I. Enríquez, Monika Gosin, Cecilia Sánchez Hill, Felipe Hinojosa, Michael Innis-Jiménez, Max Krochmal, Becky M. Nicolaides, Pedro A. Regalado, Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez, and Thomas J. Sugrue-engage a diverse range of subjects, such as urban rebellions, the suburbanization of Latinos, affordable housing, labor, the built environment, transnationalism, place-making, and religious life. The scholars also explore race within Latino communities, as well as the role that political and economic dynamics have played in creating Latino urban spaces. After reading this book, you will never see American cities the same way again.