This is an engaging study of the place occupied by the City of London within British cultural life during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Michie uses both literary and popular novels to examine socio-economic representations during this period.

If you think money can’t buy happiness, you’re not spending it right. Two rising stars in behavioral science explain how money can buy happiness—if you follow five core principles of smarter spending. If you think money can’t buy happiness, you’re not spending it right. Two rising stars in behavioral science explain how money can buy happiness—if you follow five core principles of smarter spending. Happy Money offers a tour of new research on the science of spending. Most people recognize that they need professional advice on how to earn, save, and invest their money. When it comes to spending that money, most people just follow their intuitions. But scientific research shows that those intuitions are often wrong. Happy Money explains why you can get more happiness for your money by following five principles, from choosing experiences over stuff to spending money on others. And the five principles can be used not only by individuals but by companies seeking to create happier employees and provide “happier products” to their customers. Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton show how companies from Google to Pepsi to Crate & Barrel have put these ideas into action. Along the way, the authors describe new research that reveals that luxury cars often provide no more pleasure than economy models, that commercials can actually enhance the enjoyment of watching television, and that residents of many cities frequently miss out on inexpensive pleasures in their hometowns. By the end of this book, readers will ask themselves one simple question whenever they reach for their wallets: Am I getting the biggest happiness bang for my buck?

An entertaining, deeply informative explanation of how high-level financial crimes work, written by an industry insider who’s an expert in the field. The way most white-collar crime works is by manipulating institutional psychology. That means creating something that looks as much as possible like a normal set of transactions. The drama comes later, when it all unwinds. Financial crime seems horribly complicated, but there are only so many ways you can con someone out of what’s theirs. In Lying for Money, veteran regulatory economist and market analyst Dan Davies tells the story of fraud through a genealogy of financial malfeasance, including: the Great Salad Oil swindle, the Pigeon King International fraud, the fictional British colony of Poyais in South America, the Boston Ladies’ Deposit Company, the Portuguese Banknote Affair, Theranos, and the Bre-X scam. Davies brings new insights into these schemes and shows how all frauds, current and historical, belong to one of four categories (“long firm,” counterfeiting, control fraud, and market crimes) and operate on the same basic principles. The only elements that change are the victims, the scammers, and the terminology. Davies has years of experience picking the bones out of some of the most famous frauds of the modern age. Now he reveals the big picture that emerges from their labyrinths of deceit and explains how fraud has shaped the entire development of the modern world economy.

Given the prevalence of bounded morality and possibly tainted financial gains, this research examines how feeling guilty about money changes consumer spending. Extending the research on mental and emotional accounting, we propose that consumers also engage in “moral accounting”: consumers spend money differently depending on the moral nature of the emotion (i.e., guilt) associated with the money. We show that tainting money with moral guilt resulting from a moral violation increases pro-social spending, whereas tainting money with self-control guilt elicited from a personal self-control failure increases self-improvement spending. Moreover, this effect of moral guilt (but not of self-control guilt) is magnified by consumers' self-importance of moral identity--confirming the moral nature of guilt as the driving factor underlying the differential guilt effects. We further find that moral guilt can be bound to money, leading to a pre-occupation with cleansing the money by spending some of it pro-socially, rather than engaging in other activities that could more effectively reinforce their moral identity (i.e., volunteering time). These results suggest that associating moral guilt with money--and focusing on that money instead of its moral implications for the self--acts as a proactive self-protection (vs. reactive self-repair) strategy against a self-threat.

Protect and grow your finances with help from this definitive and practical guide to behavioral economics—revised and updated to reflect new economic realities. In their fascinating investigation of the ways we handle money, Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich reveal the psychological forces—the patterns of thinking and decision making—behind seemingly irrational behavior. They explain why so many otherwise savvy people make foolish financial choices: why investors are too quick to sell winning stocks and too slow to sell losing shares, why home sellers leave money on the table and home buyers don’t get the biggest bang for their buck, why borrowers pay too much credit card interest and savers can’t sock away as much as they’d like, and why so many of us can’t control our spending. Focusing on the decisions we make every day, Belsky and Gilovich provide invaluable guidance for avoiding the financial faux pas that can cost thousands of dollars each year. Filled with fresh insight; practical advice; and lively, illustrative anecdotes, this book gives you the tools you need to harness the powerful science of behavioral economics in any financial environment.

"You can't be convicted of a crime without a guilty act and a guilty mind." A lawyer might dress the same idea up in Latin: "You can't be convicted of a crime without actus reus and mens rea." Things like that are often said, but what do people mean when they say them? Guilty Acts, Guilty Minds proposes an understanding of mens rea and actus reus as limits on the authority of a state, and in particular the authority of a democratic state, to ascribe guilt through positive law to those accused of crime. Actus reus and mens rea are necessary conditions, among others, for the legitimacy, as distinct from the justice, of state punishment. The actus reus requirement disables a democratic state from using its authority, on the one hand, to ascribe guilt to those who didn't realize they were committing a crime, provided they lacked the capacity to realize they were committing a crime; and on the other, to ascribe guilt to those who realized they were committing a crime, but who lacked the capacity to conform their conduct to the requirements of law. The mens rea requirement disables a democratic state from using its authority, on the one hand, to ascribe guilt to those who didn't realize they were committing a crime, provided their ignorance manifested no lack of law-abiding concern for the law and its ends, and on the other, to ascribe guilt to those who realized they were committing a crime, but whose failure to conform to the law nonetheless manifested no lack of law-abiding concern for the law and its ends"--