Financial markets use persuasion, propaganda and salesmanship to survive. They smooth over weaknesses and highlight their strengths to seduce us into parting with our money. Investment products wrapped in euphemisms and simplified language hide complexity and unclear risk. This book helps you to understand the real risks involved in investing, make informed decisions and take control of your investments.

Money can buy simple resources such as higher teacher salaries and smaller class sizes, but these resources are actually some of the weakest predictors of educational outcomes. On the other hand, complex resources pertaining to school practices are astonishingly strong predictors of success. The author finds that tracking policies have the most profound and consistent impact on student outcomes over time. Schools often relegate low performing students, particularly minorities, to vocational, remedial, and special education tracks. So even in well funded schools, resources may never reach the students who need them most. He also finds that innovation in the classroom has a critical impact on student success. Here, too, America's schools are stratified.

What does money mean? Where does it come from and how does it work? In this highly topical book, Mary Mellor, an expert on money, examines money’s social, political and commercial histories to debunk longstanding myths such as money being in short supply and needing to come from somewhere. Arguing that money’s immense social value means that its creation and circulation should be a matter of democratic choice, she sets out a new finance system, based on green and feminist concerns, to bring radical change for social good.

How does the standard of living of gay men and lesbians compare with that of heterosexuals? Do homosexuals make financial and family decisions differently? Why are the professional lives of gay men and lesbians dissimilar from those of heterosexuals? Or do they even differ? Have gay people benefited from the recent economic boom? Or have public policies denied them their fair share? Money, Myths, and Change provides new answers to these complex questions. This is the first comprehensive work to explore the economic lives of gays and lesbians in the United States. M. V. Lee Badgett weaves through and debunks common stereotypes about gay privilege, income, and consumer behavior. Studying the ends and means of gay life from an economic perspective, she disproves the assumption that gay men and lesbians are more affluent than heterosexuals, that they inspire discrimination when they come out of the closet, that they consume more conspicuously, that they enjoy a more self-indulgent, even hedonistic lifestyle. Badgett gets to the heart of these misconceptions through an analysis of the crucial issues that affect the livelihood of gay men and lesbians: discrimination in the workplace, denial of health care benefits to domestic partners and children, lack of access to legal institutions such as marriage, the corporate wooing of gay consumer dollars, and the use of gay economic clout to inspire social and political change. Both timely and readable, Money, Myths, and Change stands as a much-needed corrective to the assumptions that inhibit gay economic equality. It is a definitive work that sheds new light on just what it means to be gay or lesbian in the United States.

Be ambitious; find everlasting love; look after your health ... There are countless stories about how we ought to live our lives. These narratives can make our lives easier, and they might sometimes make us happier too. But they can also trap us and those around us. In Happy Ever After, bestselling happiness expert Professor Paul Dolan draws on a wealth of evidence to bust the common myths about our sources of happiness and shows that there can be many unexpected paths to lasting happiness. Some of these might involve not going into higher education, choosing not to marry, rewarding acts rooted in self-interest and caring a little less about living forever. By freeing ourselves from the myth of the perfect life, we might each find a life worth living.

A New York Times Bestseller The leading thinker and most visible public advocate of modern monetary theory -- the freshest and most important idea about economics in decades -- delivers a radically different, bold, new understanding for how to build a just and prosperous society. Stephanie Kelton's brilliant exploration of modern monetary theory (MMT) dramatically changes our understanding of how we can best deal with crucial issues ranging from poverty and inequality to creating jobs, expanding health care coverage, climate change, and building resilient infrastructure. Any ambitious proposal, however, inevitably runs into the buzz saw of how to find the money to pay for it, rooted in myths about deficits that are hobbling us as a country. Kelton busts through the myths that prevent us from taking action: that the federal government should budget like a household, that deficits will harm the next generation, crowd out private investment, and undermine long-term growth, and that entitlements are propelling us toward a grave fiscal crisis. MMT, as Kelton shows, shifts the terrain from narrow budgetary questions to one of broader economic and social benefits. With its important new ways of understanding money, taxes, and the critical role of deficit spending, MMT redefines how to responsibly use our resources so that we can maximize our potential as a society. MMT gives us the power to imagine a new politics and a new economy and move from a narrative of scarcity to one of opportunity.

An insightful and original look at why understanding macroeconomics is essential for all investors