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Introduction - The reason this book exists lies in the profound, the shining, the glorious income revolution which has occurred in the United States just in my generation.

We are today the greatest middle-income nation the world has ever known. Just in the years since the cataclysmic depression of the early thirties we have turned ourselves from a country built in the shape of an economic pyramid—with most people living at very low-income levels, and with only the few wealthy concentrated at the top—into a country built in the shape of an economic diamond—with most people living in the middle-income levels and fewer and fewer concentrated at the very top and the very bottom. In this single generation, we have lived through a bloodless revolution which must go down in world history as among the most exhilarating ever in objective and achievement.

1. Economics - You are dreaming the American Dream of going into business for yourself. What are the chances that you'll succeed and what guides will help you succeed? You are feeling low about your cash position right now and would get what could be a vital lift if you knew just how big your financial assets are. How do you go about figuring your net worth?

2. Investing Hints - The title of this chapter—"Hints on Investing'—is accurate. For here you'll not find any new system for getting rich quick in the stock market or any learned dissertation on the pros and cons of popular methods of investing, speculating, and gambling in se­curities.

Instead, you'll find hints which may be of major practical assistance to you, little known financial facts which may puncture some cherished folklore, and aspects of the various forms of investing which I trust you’ll approve if known to you before and appreciate if they're brand-new to you.

3. 1929 Again? - The preceding section of this book gave you some hints about investing in the stock market. But the memory of the 1929 crash discouraged many from putting money into stocks. Just how real is that fear? Can you invest with confidence or not?

A while ago, Edward N. Gadsby, the chairman during the Eisenhower Administration of the Securities and Exchange Com­mission, the Federal Government's major financial policing agency, delivered a long speech in which he explained why he thought there would not be a repetition of the holocaust of 1929—the year which marked the start of the worst stock market collapse in all history and the worst depression of all time.

4. Bafflegab - Since the time when I entered the field of financial reporting and analysis as a teenager, I1 have had one crusade above all others— to try to translate into language I could understand, and thus you could understand, the pompous phrases, the tortuously compli­cated technical jargon of the professional economists and syllable-worshiping experts.

5. Executive Life - The American society of the mid-twentieth century has created a distinct character known as the corporate executive, who has recognizable habits of dining, wining, loving, politicking, and job-hunting, and recognizable problems in the identical areas.

Herewith several observations, pro and con, on this character and his way of life, some of which I suspect will intrigue and others will infuriate you as they have {and still do) me.

6. Inflation - Of all the bread-and-butter subjects close to your family life in recent years, among the closest surely ranks the rise in your cost of living. The slash in your dollars buying power, the pinch on your pocketbook. These are topics about which you can speak as eloquently as any economist You know the story; you've been living it.

7. World Survival - "We can't possibly include reports on the economic war between East and West written so long ago I" I complained. "Why remind people in the 1960s how it was in 1954 and 1955?"

But then I thought, "Yes, that's just why it is wise to include them—as a grim reminder. Why not show that behind today's problem lies a long history of failure to recognize obvious chal­lenges? Why go along with the pretense that the economic war Russia is waging against us now is 'new’?”

8. Womanpower - InAmerica of mid-twentieth century, Midas is a lady.

You, Mrs. or Miss America, are now the dominant owner of the stocks of our great industrial, utility, and railroad corporations.

You are more and more the acknowledged as well as the actual money manager in the home. In most families, you either do all the family's banking or you split the job with your husband, and in half the families you and not your husband handle the more intricate banking jobs, such as arranging personal loans or the mortgage.

9. Aging Nation - If you're a man under forty or a woman under thirty holding a job today, the reports that follow may seem important only to someone else. But of course, you hope to live to be over forty and many years beyond that. When you do, the colossally stupid and cruel conditions about which you'll now read will become of deepest •financial, emotional, and physical meaning to you.

10. Future - In July 1959, shortly before President Eisenhower sent his first formal request to Congress to eliminate the forty-three-year-old interest rate ceiling on the sale of new United States Government bonds, a seemingly innocuous compromise amendment was tacked on to a House Ways and Means Committee proposal to achieve this end.

11. Promises - A problem can be a promise. The revolution in our employment structure which, as you read in Chapter Ten, has erased hundreds of thousands of jobs also has, as you II read in this chapter, made our over-all economy more depression-proof than ever before.

The jams in our cities which have forced tens of millions into the suburbs also are compelling our cities to realize that their survival is endangered.

THE END