Invested : How Three Centuries of Stock Market Advice Reshaped Our Money, Markets, and Minds

Invested examines the perennial and nefarious appeal of financial advice manuals. Who hasn’t wished for a surefire formula for riches and a ticket to the good life? For three centuries, investment advisers of all kinds, legit and otherwise, have guaranteed that they alone can illuminate the golden pathway to prosperity—despite strong evidence to the contrary. In fact, too often, they are singing a siren song of devastation. And yet we keep listening. Invested tells the story of how the genre of investment advice developed and grew in the United Kingdom and the United States, from its origins in the eighteenth century through today, as it saturates our world. The authors analyze centuries of books, TV shows, blogs, and more, all promising techniques for amateur investors to master the ways of the market: from Thomas Mortimer’s pathbreaking 1761 work, Every Man His Own Broker , through the Gilded Age explosion of sensationalist investment manuals, the early twentieth-century emergence of a vernacular financial science, and the more recent convergence of self-help and personal finance. Invested asks why, in the absence of evidence that such advice reliably works, guides to the stock market have remained perennially popular. The authors argue that the appeal of popular investment advice lies in its promise to level the playing field, giving outsiders the privileged information of insiders. As Invested persuasively shows, the fantasies sold by these writings are damaging and deceptive, peddling unrealistic visions of easy profits and the certainty of success, while trying to hide the fact that there is no formula for avoiding life’s economic uncertainties and calamities. "As more people than ever invest in the stock market, many feel a profound need for professional advice about it. Yet a financial adviser generally has no idea what's going to happen. The 300-year history of everyday financial advice in the capitalist world--encompassing eighteenth-century domestic advice manuals; Gilded Age swindles; market crashes; the boom in self-help rhetoric; and TV shoutfests--is one of dart throwing, brazen hucksterism, and serial failure. It spans the Atlantic and is ultimately a cultural history of rhetoric and imagination, not rationality. Remarkably, the authors of this book conclude advice aims less to guide investors toward financial returns than to create a kind of citizen, one who assumes others' risks, monetizes the future, and becomes in themselves a kind of investment"-- Provided by publisher Contents Introduction: Three Centuries of Financial Advice Chapter 1. Making the Market (1720–1800) Chapter 2. Navigating the Market (1800–1870) Chapter 3. Playing the Market (1870–1910) Chapter 4. Chartists and Fundamentalists (1910–1950) Chapter 5. Domestic Budgets and Efficient Markets (1950–1990) Chapter 6. Gurus and Robots (1990–2020) Conclusion: Investing through the Crisis Acknowledgments Notes Index