Financial Planning is More Than Investment Selection... Life is about determining what you really want and figuring out how to make it happen. Each of us needs to strike a balance―all it takes is understanding what is truly important to you. Stop Trying to Keep Up with the Joneses… They’re Broke Anyway is author Brad Berger’s personal approach to financial planning that goes beyond investment options, performance, and avoiding risk to help you identify your family’s dreams and to start planning together to make them happen. Inside, you will learn to: • Align your financial choices with your most important goals and most deeply held values • Put your entire financial house in order and keep it that way • Have confidence in your plans and your future in any financial market • Focus on the things in your life that are more important than money.

. . . a very valuable introduction to Aristotle s economics. History of Economic Ideas Spencer Pack is completely at home with the difficult works of Aristotle, Adam Smith and Karl Marx. To walk with him through their writings is to discover that they are surprisingly helpful in understanding the modern world of computers, credit crunches, religious differences, international conflicts, and unemployment due to oversaving in China and undersaving in America. One is left after reading them with growing admiration for the giants of past intellectual history. This is only one lesson that Pack teaches in this illuminating book. Mark Blaug, University of London and University of Buckingham, UK This is an unusually ambitious and unpretentious work. And it is successful. Pack effectively compares the ideas of each of the three great men without forcing those of one upon the others. The topics are exchange value, money, capital, character, government, and change, which the author considers to be the fundamental issues in 21st century political economy. Pack is especially successful in utilizing a wide spectrum of secondary (including contemporary) sources to enrich the analysis of the expected primary sources. Student readers will be exposed to the opportunities and problems of variation in interpretation. The author has studiously avoided insinuating and privileging his own views and naively repeating well-worn and misleading, if not also erroneous, ideology-laden positions. Warren J. Samuels, Michigan State University, US Spencer Pack has written a most illuminating and insightful book. Beginning from Aristotelian foundations, Pack focuses our attention on an essential economic and moral issue: the difference between value in use and value in exchange. From this vantage point, he evaluates the arguments of Smith and Marx, demonstrating how their theories, both drawing on Aristotle, unfold into a general analysis of capitalism. His account forces us to think deeply about the nature of capitalist society. I recommend it highly. John F. Henry, University of Missouri-Kansas City, US Spencer Pack compares and contrasts Aristotle s, Smith s and Marx s theoretical systems on six fundamental issues: exchange value, money, capital, character, government, and change. This book also provides insights on issues concerning the continuing development of world money, saving, managerial capitalism, corrupt governments, and various secular and religious movements for social change.

Argues that the struggle over income, wealth, status and privilege-inequality-has been the principal, defining issue in human history and provides a novel framework for understanding inequality today Whereas President Barack Obama declared inequality as the defining issue of our time, in The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality, Jon D. Wisman claims more: it is the defining issue of all human history. The struggle over inequality has been the underlying force driving human history's unfolding. Drawing on the dynamics of inequality, Wisman re-interprets economic history and society. Beyond according inequality the central role in history, this book is novel in two other respects: First, transcending the general failure of social scientists and historians to anchor their work in explicit theories of human behaviour, this book grounds the origins and dynamics of inequality in evolutionary psychology, or more specifically, Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Second, this book accords central importance to ideology in legitimating inequality, a role typically inadequately addressed by social scientists and historians. Because of the central role of inequality in history, inequality's explosion over the past forty years has not been an anomaly. It is a return to the political dynamics by which elites have, since the rise of the state, taken practically everything for themselves, leaving all others with little more than the means with which to survive. Due to elites' persuasive ideology, even after workers in advanced capitalist countries gained the franchise to become the overwhelming majority of voters, inequality continued to increase. Sweeping and provocative, Jon D. Wisman presents a fresh perspective on why economic inequality exists and how its dynamics have shaped human history.

​ ​This book argues that social and environmental policy should be synthetically treated as one and the same field, that both are but two aspects of the same coin – if sustainability is the goal. Such a paradigm shift is indicated, important, and timely to effectively move towards sustainability. This book is the first to take this approach and to give examples for it. Not to synthetically merge the two fields has been and will continue to be highly insufficient, inefficient and contradictory for policy and public administration aiming for a transformation towards a sustainable world. In general, social problems are dealt with in one “policy corner” and environmental problems in another. Rarely is social policy (at large) concerned with its impact on the environment or its connection with and relevance to environmental policy. Equally, environmental problems are generally not seen in conjunction with social policy, even though much environmental policy directly relates to health, nutrition, migration and other issues addressed by social policy. This book intends to correct the pattern to separate these very significant and large policy fields. Using examples from diverse academic and applied fields, it is shown how environmental policy can (and should) be thought of as social policy – and how social policy can (and should) simultaneously be seen as environmental policy. Tremendous benefits are to be expected.

Written by leading scholars from various disciplines, this book presents current research on topics such as public choice, game theory, and political economy. It features contributions on fundamental, methodological, and empirical issues around the concepts of power and responsibility that strive to bridge the gap between different disciplinary approaches. The contributions fall into roughly four sub-disciplines: voting and voting power, public economics and politics, economics and philosophy, as well as labor economics. On the occasion of his 75th birthday, this book is written in honor of Manfred J. Holler, an economist by training and profession whose work as a guiding light has helped advance our understanding of the interdisciplinary connections of concepts of power and responsibility. He has written many articles and books on game theory, and worked extensively on questions of labor economics, politics, and philosophy.

In this short but powerful book of interlinked essays, noted cultural critic Vijay Prashad examines the contradictions of the American economy. Prashad assesses a range of related issues: the oft-vaunted US economy, propped up by the rising debt of poor and middle-class workers; welfare policies that punish those attempting to escape the grip of debt and poverty; and a prison industry that regulates and houses the unemployed, as well as a reserve army of laborers. In Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses, Prashad argues that the advent of mass production and advertising has converted citizens into consumers whose desires are captured by the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses." Yet, as Prashad so persuasively demonstrates, keeping up with the Joneses is a trap: Americans have gone into massive consumer debt, with the poorest forty percent of the public borrowing money to compensate for stagnant incomes, not to spend on luxuries. Only the richest twenty percent borrow money to invest in stocks. Not surprisingly, in the last few years, income and wealth differentials have risen to record highs. By making crystal-clear connections between the economy, welfare reform and the profit-driven prison industrial complex, Prashad offers a vision for a sustainable and vital anti-imperialist movement. Vijay Prashad is Associate Professor and Director of International Studies, Trinity College. He is the author of several books including Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity, Fat Cats and Running Dogs and The Karma of Brown Folk. Each was included in the Village Voice’s "25 Best Books of the Year" list.

If the nations of the world were to unite - against what would they unite? Against whom? Manhattan corporate lawyer Kevin Traynor gets entangled in a conspiracy that threatens to destroy his world - in the name of humanity. Through the skyscraper canyons of Manhattan, along the Old Man River, to the boondocks of Old Europe, and over the roofs of Paris Traynor has to hunt a secret that is about to end civilization as we know it. The hurricane of the century, enemy jetfighters, explosions, and earth-shattering disaster - what can stop him? And whom can he trust? The government? His associates? His friends? His mysterious new lover? Himself? Anyone? Who is scheming to bring about the end of the world? Greedy businessmen? Corrupt politicians? Religious fanatics? Or... Kevin Traynor. With the right to be politically incorrect.