The Conclusion reflects on the long-term trajectory of welfare in Europe, highlighting the substantial increases in living standards that have occurred over the past centuries. It considers how technological and institutional developments have enabled sustained economic growth, while also acknowledging the environmental and social challenges that have emerged, particularly in the context of climate change. The Epilogue discusses the potential for future crises, including economic and environmental shocks, and whether Europe’s economic system is resilient enough to manage these challenges. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the importance of learning from historical experiences to address contemporary and future issues related to sustainability, inequality and economic development. By framing modern problems within the context of long-term economic history, the authors offer an optimistic yet cautious outlook on Europe’s ability to continue improving welfare in a sustainable manner.

This chapter traces the early economic history of Europe, focusing on the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural civilizations. It examines the emergence of cities, the development of trade and the influence of geography on European economic integration. The chapter explores how early agricultural innovations, such as the domestication of crops and animals, laid the foundation for the rise of European civilizations, particularly in Greece and Rome. It also discusses the geo-economic continuity of Europe, showing how trade fostered cultural and political integration despite frequent conflicts. Through an analysis of early European economies, the chapter highlights the role of agriculture and trade as key forces in shaping the region’s development.

This chapter focuses on the role of governments in managing economic growth and development, particularly through macroeconomic policy. It traces the evolution of government intervention in the economy, from the minimal state of the nineteenth century to the more active role governments played in the twentieth century, especially in response to crises such as the Great Depression. The chapter also examines the development of the welfare state and the use of fiscal and monetary policies to stabilize economies. By discussing the successes and failures of government interventions, the chapter highlights the ongoing debate over the appropriate role of the state in managing economic outcomes and ensuring long-term growth.

Often, students generate a research question, formulate hypotheses, and wonder, “What statistics should I use?” These statistics, drilled into their brains from previous courses, sometimes contain little to no meaningful associations to real-world concepts. It is the transference of these skills (or lack of!) that can hang up a new researcher on how to explore their hypotheses. This chapter brings students through the process of selecting successful research questions and the formulation of hypotheses. Dependent and independent variables are reviewed along with cause-and-effect relationships. The relationship between statistical power, statistical significance, effect size, and sample size is discussed along with step-by-step instructions for estimating sample size.

The focus has been on basic declarative clauses, or independent clauses that state information. This chapter shifts the focus to discuss other types of clauses. The first section explores strategies for forming questions, including yes/no questions and wh-word questions, and the second section focuses on grammatical strategies for giving commands. The third section dives into features of joining clauses, introducing complement clauses and relative clauses, while the fourth section compares coordination and subordination strategies as methods for joining clauses. By the end of the chapter, you will be ready to create more complex clauses in your language.

The first section of this chapter introduces and defines what constitutes a “basic word” within a language and connects the notion of basic words to issues related to world-building. The second section identifies key considerations you need to make as you describe your speakers and construct a world for them, and the final sections ask you to focus on how your speakers meet their basic daily needs and the words they might need in their language to communicate about those needs. At the end of this chapter, you will be asked to provide more detailed information about your speakers and conworld and connect those pieces of information to a beginning list of basic vocabulary in your language.

This chapter explores ways you can expand information provided in noun phrases, with the first half focusing on grammatical specification and the second half on semantic modification. The first section investigates the types of determiners that occur in languages, including articles and demonstratives, and the second section focuses on possessive forms and the types of relationships they can reflect. The final two sections introduce modifiers that can occur within noun phrases, including adjectives and adposition phrases. You will decide if your language will have any adjectives belonging to its basic vocabulary and set a foundation for the shapes modifiers take within noun phrases.

The first section of the chapter introduces you to the world of pronouns, beginning with personal pronouns, whose (typically small) forms can inflect to indicate a wide range of grammatical information: person, number, class, and case. The next section focuses on other pronouns, including demonstrative, reflexive, and indefinite forms. The chapter ends with a discussion of verb agreement to demonstrate how verbs can inflect to agree with at least one argument in the clause and connects verb agreement inflections to pronouns and their use. By the end of this chapter, you will have developed series of pronouns for your language and made your first major decision about verb inflections.

Null hypothesis significance testing is reviewed along with how this method is used for testing hypotheses in research studies. Students are guided through the structures of experimental and correlational studies along with justifications for performing one method or the other. Factors involving choosing surveys, including considerations of reliability and validity, are discussed. Understanding what survey constructs (i.e., psychometric factors) are, how they are developed, and how they are scored are reviewed. Cronbach’s α and McDonald’s ω are reviewed as popular ways to measure the internal consistency reliability of subscales in a survey. Students are taught how to calculate these two statistics using SPSS and R.

This chapter focuses on foundational grammatical concepts, first discussing the basic difference between content and function lexical categories before moving on to morphological language type, grammaticalization, and inflectional marking. The information investigated in this and the next four chapters is so interconnected that the material, as it is presented, is a bit like a spiral. One section will introduce you to a specific concept with a handful of other concepts and then a later section will return to that initial concept while discussing other related concepts. This material will continue to be presented using a spiraling method, linking the major grammatical concepts of this and the next four chapters. The grammatical decisions you will make at the end of this chapter focus on how much grammatical information is packaged within a single word unit and how constituents beyond the subject, object, and verb are typically ordered in clauses.

Students are guided through learning about comparing the means of two groups / levels using a t-test. The differences between a paired samples t-test and an independent samples t-test are reviewed along with the statistics’ assumptions. When two independent groups do not have equal variances, students are coached through completing a Mann–Whitney U test. Students are also guided through creating charts that can accompany their results in SPSS or R.

The chi-square test of independence, goodness-of-fit, and McNemar test are reviewed as methods for student researchers to compare the frequencies between categorical variables. The applications, appropriateness, and use for testing hypotheses are reviewed. The differences between categorical vs. scalar and non-parametric vs. parametric tests are reviewed. Additionally, how to interpret mosaic plots and bar charts is discussed. Step-by-step instructions are given to perform these statistics along with how to generate the appropriate plots in SPSS and R.