Categories

Relations between states as they were actually conducted: treaties, negotiation, alliance and rupture.

Language above the sentence: how stretches of talk and text hold together, and what social work they do.

Mathematics of structures that are countable rather than continuous: sets, graphs, logic, and finite algebra.

Teaching people who are not in the room: correspondence courses, open universities, online programmes and the MOOC literature that grew out of them.

Systems whose parts run on separate machines and must agree despite delay and failure: consensus, replication, consistency models.

Systems whose state evolves under a fixed rule, and the long-run behaviour that follows: fixed points, attractors, chaos.

Learning before school: what young children can do, what preschool provision changes, and how much of the effect is still there years later.

From roughly the Renaissance to the age of revolutions: printing, empire, reformation and the first global exchange.

The study of the planet Earth: what it is made of, how its rocks, oceans, ice and atmosphere behave, and how all of it got to be the way it is.

The study of how organisms interact with one another and with their physical environment.

Statistical method built for economic data: identification, causal inference from observational evidence, and the estimation of models nobody can run an experiment on.

Production, exchange and value in their cultural setting: gift, barter, reciprocity and market, compared across societies rather than assumed.

Ore deposits and other useful earth materials: how they concentrate, and how to find them.

Economies of the past, reconstructed from the record: prices, wages, trade and growth over the long run, and what they say about why some places pulled ahead.

How people, firms and states allocate scarce resources: what they choose, what those choices add up to, and what the evidence says about both.

Markets and economic action as social things: embedded in networks, norms and institutions rather than in isolated rational choice.

Education as investment and as expenditure: what schooling returns to a person and to a country, and which spending actually buys attainment.

The study of teaching and learning: how people come to know things, how schooling and universities are organised, and what any of it achieves. The research, not the practice of teaching.

Measuring what someone has learned: test design, validity and reliability, and what a score is entitled to be used for.

How education is steered: curricula and standards set from above, funding formulas, selection and access, and what the evidence says about any of it.