Ah, October. Leaves turning, football crowds cheering, developing economies tanking, stock markets crashing. The memories return every autumn, with Proustian clarity. At any time of the year, it would take a certain chutzpah to claim that the wild bull market of the 1990s is going to keep charging higher and higher. But to do so in October is to exhibit either reckless disregard for history or brilliantly prescient foresight. Or both.

Yet here they are, just in time to make perfect anniversary gifts for those commemorating the stock market disasters of October 1929, October 1987, or October 1998: Four brave books that claim the best is yet to come for investors and the general economy.

Believe it or not, the least audacious of these titles may be Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market (Times Books, $25, 0812931459; Soundelux audio, abridged, $17.95, 1559353260), by James K. Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett. I confess I’m always skeptical about books of prognostication, whether they are optimistic or full of gloom and doom. (Remember Ravi Batra’s The Great Depression of 1990? It’s out of print now, but Batra soldiers on: his latest work is Crash of the Millennium: Surviving the Coming Inflationary Depression from Harmony Books.) And yet Dow 36,000, with its intricate but lucidly argued analyses, has just about won me over.

Every prospectus churned out by a publicly traded company or mutual fund includes a mantra that’s about as meaningful as cigarette-pack labels or instructions on how to use one’s seat cushion as a floatation device: Previous performance is no guarantee of future results. Washington Post columnist Glassman and think-tank scholar Hassett take these words at face value. Evaluating stocks by historical measures, they claim, ignores their true, latent strength.

The authors offer a new yardstick for measuring the markets: Perfectly Reasonable Price. The PRP is the price a long-term investor would be willing to pay for an investment. Traditionalists in the investment world use price-to-earnings ratios (how much the buyer must pay per dollar of the company’s profits) as a standard for judging the valuation of stocks. By that historical standard, the market is wildly overvalued and due for a painful correction. Problem is, the traditionalists have been saying so for years now, and they are starting to sound like Chicken Little. Glassman and Hassett posit that the market indices have only begun to climb, and that it’s perfectly reasonable to buy stocks at today’s nosebleed-altitude earnings multiples.

In well-crafted layman’s prose, they calculate the PRP of a few individual stocks, analyzing recent trends in earnings growth, dividend growth, and other factors that point to long-term success for the companies. By this reckoning, home mortgage giant Fannie Mae (to take one example) is worth nothing like its May 1999 price of $67 a share: its PRP could be as high as $872. The authors don’t claim that the markets as a whole will do this well, but it’s easy enough for the Dow to reach the 36,000 target if, as they assert, many stocks are currently trading well below their PRPs.

Dow 36,000 makes a cogent and convincing argument that the good times are going to roll on and on. If that’s true, readers who follow this book’s suggestions in navigating the markets will triple their money and then some. Whether it’s true or not, this intriguing book is going to be a very interesting read in five, 15, or 20 years, with its authors enshrined as either the butt of jokes or visionary geniuses.

While Glassman and Hassett don’t predict at what magic moment the Dow Jones Industrial Average will crack 36,000, Charles W. Kadlec goes further out on a limb. In Dow 100,000: Fact or Fiction (Prentice Hall, $25, 0735201374), Kadlec offers a date certain for the completion of a tenfold rise in the Dow: the year 2020.

An investment strategist for a mutual fund firm, Kadlec cites some of the same optimistic reasoning as the other authors for the huge boost in stocks such as gains in productivity, improvements in management and more free global trade but his dramatic scenario of future prosperity relies more on a long view of historical economic developments than on technical analysis of equity markets. He puts the internet into context, for instance, by discussing the impact of the railroads and the telegraph in the last half of the 19th century.

Taking the long view, Kadlec is not shy about drawing a parallel between the 1990s and the 1920s the decade that ended in a cataclysmic market crash. He notes that if the Dow grows in years to come at the same rate it did in the ’20s, it will reach 100,000 by 2016. He sees no reason to consider a crash inevitable after such an explosion. Kadlec’s command of historical detail, and his talent for drawing incisive parallels between past, present, and predicted future, make this book particularly thought-provoking.

Kadlec warns that continued progress is not a sure thing. Taking a broad view of economic and social policy issues that will influence financial markets, Kadlec draws surprising conclusions about the threats that the American economy faces for instance, that Medicare is in much worse shape than Social Security and is headed for a stark choice between full coverage of those in need and fiscal solvency, and that global terrorism lurks as a risk not adequately appreciated by investors. Readers intoxicated by the vision of a six-digit Dow will find these warnings sobering.

Still, Kadlec presents an exhilarating vision of what really might be. Dow 100,000 is no fantasy: Kadlec argues persuasively that the number is attainable.

Knight Kiplinger, representing the third generation of a family that has made its living by economic forecasting in personal finance publications, weighs in with further cheerful tidings in World Boom Ahead: Why Business and Consumers Will Prosper (Kiplinger Books, $14.95, 0938721704). The first edition of this book came out just as the Asian financial crisis was spooking markets last year, but this updated paperback version is even more optimistic. Kiplinger’s focus is on the long term, and he has an authoritative command of the trends reshaping our lives.

Kiplinger is somewhat at odds with the Dow boosters, predicting a less boomy stock market in the decade to come. In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if stocks head south for a year or two in the near future, but he finds the long-term trends bright. Though he sees the U.S. economy continuing to perform very well, he says the greatest growth in the new millennium will come in the rest of the world. The author foresees a planet teeming with 1.5 billion new humans by 2020, most born in less-developed countries but that prospect doesn’t trouble him. Living standards will rise for these less-fortunate earthlings, he predicts. The real problems will come to countries with too few residents of working age. A relatively open immigration policy has already given the U.S. a competitive advantage in that department.

World Boom Ahead includes an engrossing survey of future developments in industry and society, picking the relative winners and losers of the new economy. A few samples: Traditional retailers will see the downside of chasing super-shoppers, as boomers burn out on the mall . . . In a low-inflation climate, home prices will grow less steeply than in the past . . . Four-hour supersonic trips across the Pacific, day-trading 80-year-olds and microchip-imbedded cattle all await us in Kiplinger’s 21st century.

Buck Rogers lives. If Kiplinger’s work is not enough to convince you, maybe another new release will: The Long Boom: A History of the World’s Future, 1980-2020, by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, and Joel Hyatt a consultant, technology journalist, and Stanford business professor, respectively.

Imagine this world as the authors imagine it, viewed in hindsight from 2050: We humans have fixed the damage we had done to the environment, without denting anyone’s standard of living. Cars now run on hydrogen fuel cells refilled twice a year. Machines the size of molecules and 120-year life spans are realities for today’s George and Jane Jetsons, and nothing is out of the realm of possibility not cold fusion energy, not anti-gravity devices, not cooperation with alien life forms.

This is a mind-boggling book.

These authors see the present moment as a watershed in human history. Emerging technologies and new modes of deploying human capital, they argue, are in the process of bringing about an unprecedented leap in the progress of civilization. If we can all get it right, the result will be good times throughout the planet we currently inhabit and beyond.

There will be bumps in the road the overthrow of Saudi Arabia’s government by Islamic fundamentalists will cause another oil shock in the economy, for instance. But an evolving civilization, in which all peoples are bound together by common interests and increasingly shared prosperity, will be able to work through such rough patches, in the view of Schwartz, Leyden, and Hyatt.

Like all the authors mentioned here, though perhaps to a far greater degree, The Long Boom’s visionaries have taken on the risk of being ridiculed, now or in the future. But their well-reasoned speculations, and the acrobatic dexterity with which they have stretched their minds, will not be ignored.

Briefly noted: Tom Peters, the personal trainer of American business writing, wants to pump you up. Brash visions of the new millennium are obviously in vogue this month, and Peters offers his own in a new series of books. Just out are The Brand You 50 (Alfred A. Knopf, $16.95, 0375407723), The Projects 50 ($16.95, 0375407731), and The Professional Service Firm 50 ($16.95, 0375407715). In his trademark style of breathless exhortation, Peters inspires readers to embrace the new realities of the evolving workplace and to turn themselves into sought-after brand names on the job. ¦ Journalist E. Thomas Wood is an editor with the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture magazines.

Tracking futures Ah, October. Leaves turning, football crowds cheering, developing economies tanking, stock markets crashing. The memories return every autumn, with Proustian clarity. At any time of the year, it would take a certain chutzpah to claim that the wild bull market of the 1990s is going to keep charging higher and higher. But to do so in October is to exhibit either reckless disregard for history or brilliantly prescient foresight. Or both.

Yet here they are, just in time to make perfect anniversary gifts for those commemorating the stock market disasters of October 1929, October 1987, or October 1998: Four brave books that claim the best is yet to come for investors and the general economy.

Believe it or not, the least audacious of these titles may be Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market (Times Books, $25, 0812931459; Soundelux audio, abridged, $17.95, 1559353260), by James K. Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett. I confess I’m always skeptical about books of prognostication, whether they are optimistic or full of gloom and doom. (Remember Ravi Batra’s The Great Depression of 1990? It’s out of print now, but Batra soldiers on: his latest work is Crash of the Millennium: Surviving the Coming Inflationary Depression from Harmony Books.) And yet Dow 36,000, with its intricate but lucidly argued analyses, has just about won me over.

Every prospectus churned out by a publicly traded company or mutual fund includes a mantra that’s about as meaningful as cigarette-pack labels or instructions on how to use one’s seat cushion as a floatation device: Previous performance is no guarantee of future results. Washington Post columnist Glassman and think-tank scholar Hassett take these words at face value. Evaluating stocks by historical measures, they claim, ignores their true, latent strength.

The authors offer a new yardstick for measuring the markets: Perfectly Reasonable Price. The PRP is the price a long-term investor would be willing to pay for an investment. Traditionalists in the investment world use price-to-earnings ratios (how much the buyer must pay per dollar of the company’s profits) as a standard for judging the valuation of stocks. By that historical standard, the market is wildly overvalued and due for a painful correction. Problem is, the traditionalists have been saying so for years now, and they are starting to sound like Chicken Little. Glassman and Hassett posit that the market indices have only begun to climb, and that it’s perfectly reasonable to buy stocks at today’s nosebleed-altitude earnings multiples.

In well-crafted layman’s prose, they calculate the PRP of a few individual stocks, analyzing recent trends in earnings growth, dividend growth, and other factors that point to long-term success for the companies. By this reckoning, home mortgage giant Fannie Mae (to take one example) is worth nothing like its May 1999 price of $67 a share: its PRP could be as high as $872. The authors don’t claim that the markets as a whole will do this well, but it’s easy enough for the Dow to reach the 36,000 target if, as they assert, many stocks are currently trading well below their PRPs.

Dow 36,000 makes a cogent and convincing argument that the good times are going to roll on and on. If that’s true, readers who follow this book’s suggestions in navigating the markets will triple their money and then some. Whether it’s true or not, this intriguing book is going to be a very interesting read in five, 15, or 20 years, with its authors enshrined as either the butt of jokes or visionary geniuses.

While Glassman and Hassett don’t predict at what magic moment the Dow Jones Industrial Average will crack 36,000, Charles W. Kadlec goes further out on a limb. In Dow 100,000: Fact or Fiction (Prentice Hall, $25, 0735201374), Kadlec offers a date certain for the completion of a tenfold rise in the Dow: the year 2020.

An investment strategist for a mutual fund firm, Kadlec cites some of the same optimistic reasoning as the other authors for the huge boost in stocks such as gains in productivity, improvements in management and more free global trade but his dramatic scenario of future prosperity relies more on a long view of historical economic developments than on technical analysis of equity markets. He puts the internet into context, for instance, by discussing the impact of the railroads and the telegraph in the last half of the 19th century.

Taking the long view, Kadlec is not shy about drawing a parallel between the 1990s and the 1920s the decade that ended in a cataclysmic market crash. He notes that if the Dow grows in years to come at the same rate it did in the ’20s, it will reach 100,000 by 2016. He sees no reason to consider a crash inevitable after such an explosion. Kadlec’s command of historical detail, and his talent for drawing incisive parallels between past, present, and predicted future, make this book particularly thought-provoking.

Kadlec warns that continued progress is not a sure thing. Taking a broad view of economic and social policy issues that will influence financial markets, Kadlec draws surprising conclusions about the threats that the American economy faces for instance, that Medicare is in much worse shape than Social Security and is headed for a stark choice between full coverage of those in need and fiscal solvency, and that global terrorism lurks as a risk not adequately appreciated by investors. Readers intoxicated by the vision of a six-digit Dow will find these warnings sobering.

Still, Kadlec presents an exhilarating vision of what really might be. Dow 100,000 is no fantasy: Kadlec argues persuasively that the number is attainable.

Knight Kiplinger, representing the third generation of a family that has made its living by economic forecasting in personal finance publications, weighs in with further cheerful tidings in World Boom Ahead: Why Business and Consumers Will Prosper. The first edition of this book came out just as the Asian financial crisis was spooking markets last year, but this updated paperback version is even more optimistic. Kiplinger’s focus is on the long term, and he has an authoritative command of the trends reshaping our lives.

Kiplinger is somewhat at odds with the Dow boosters, predicting a less boomy stock market in the decade to come. In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if stocks head south for a year or two in the near future, but he finds the long-term trends bright. Though he sees the U.S. economy continuing to perform very well, he says the greatest growth in the new millennium will come in the rest of the world. The author foresees a planet teeming with 1.5 billion new humans by 2020, most born in less-developed countries but that prospect doesn’t trouble him. Living standards will rise for these less-fortunate earthlings, he predicts. The real problems will come to countries with too few residents of working age. A relatively open immigration policy has already given the U.S. a competitive advantage in that department.

World Boom Ahead includes an engrossing survey of future developments in industry and society, picking the relative winners and losers of the new economy. A few samples: Traditional retailers will see the downside of chasing super-shoppers, as boomers burn out on the mall . . . In a low-inflation climate, home prices will grow less steeply than in the past . . . Four-hour supersonic trips across the Pacific, day-trading 80-year-olds and microchip-imbedded cattle all await us in Kiplinger’s 21st century.

Buck Rogers lives. If Kiplinger’s work is not enough to convince you, maybe another new release will: The Long Boom: A History of the World’s Future, 1980-2020 (Perseus Books, $26, 0738200743), by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, and Joel Hyatt a consultant, technology journalist, and Stanford business professor, respectively.

Imagine this world as the authors imagine it, viewed in hindsight from 2050: We humans have fixed the damage we had done to the environment, without denting anyone’s standard of living. Cars now run on hydrogen fuel cells refilled twice a year. Machines the size of molecules and 120-year life spans are realities for today’s George and Jane Jetsons, and nothing is out of the realm of possibility not cold fusion energy, not anti-gravity devices, not cooperation with alien life forms.

This is a mind-boggling book.

These authors see the present moment as a watershed in human history. Emerging technologies and new modes of deploying human capital, they argue, are in the process of bringing about an unprecedented leap in the progress of civilization. If we can all get it right, the result will be good times throughout the planet we currently inhabit and beyond.

There will be bumps in the road the overthrow of Saudi Arabia’s government by Islamic fundamentalists will cause another oil shock in the economy, for instance. But an evolving civilization, in which all peoples are bound together by common interests and increasingly shared prosperity, will be able to work through such rough patches, in the view of Schwartz, Leyden, and Hyatt.

Like all the authors mentioned here, though perhaps to a far greater degree, The Long Boom’s visionaries have taken on the risk of being ridiculed, now or in the future. But their well-reasoned speculations, and the acrobatic dexterity with which they have stretched their minds, will not be ignored.

Briefly noted: Tom Peters, the personal trainer of American business writing, wants to pump you up. Brash visions of the new millennium are obviously in vogue this month, and Peters offers his own in a new series of books. Just out are The Brand You 50 (Alfred A. Knopf, $16.95, 0375407723), The Projects 50 ($16.95, 0375407731), and The Professional Service Firm 50 ($16.95, 0375407715). In his trademark style of breathless exhortation, Peters inspires readers to embrace the new realities of the evolving workplace and to turn themselves into sought-after brand names on the job. ¦ Journalist E. Thomas Wood is an editor with the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture magazines.

Ah, October. Leaves turning, football crowds cheering, developing economies tanking, stock markets crashing. The memories return every autumn, with Proustian clarity. At any time of the year, it would take a certain chutzpah to claim that the wild bull market of the 1990s is going to keep charging higher and higher. But to do so in October is to exhibit either reckless disregard for history or brilliantly prescient foresight. Or both.

Yet here they are, just in time to make perfect anniversary gifts for those commemorating the stock market disasters of October 1929, October 1987, or October 1998: Four brave books that claim the best is yet to come for investors and the general economy.

Believe it or not, the least audacious of these titles may be Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market (Times Books, $25, 0812931459; Soundelux audio, abridged, $17.95, 1559353260), by James K. Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett. I confess I’m always skeptical about books of prognostication, whether they are optimistic or full of gloom and doom. (Remember Ravi Batra’s The Great Depression of 1990? It’s out of print now, but Batra soldiers on: his latest work is Crash of the Millennium: Surviving the Coming Inflationary Depression from Harmony Books.) And yet Dow 36,000, with its intricate but lucidly argued analyses, has just about won me over.

Every prospectus churned out by a publicly traded company or mutual fund includes a mantra that’s about as meaningful as cigarette-pack labels or instructions on how to use one’s seat cushion as a floatation device: Previous performance is no guarantee of future results. Washington Post columnist Glassman and think-tank scholar Hassett take these words at face value. Evaluating stocks by historical measures, they claim, ignores their true, latent strength.

The authors offer a new yardstick for measuring the markets: Perfectly Reasonable Price. The PRP is the price a long-term investor would be willing to pay for an investment. Traditionalists in the investment world use price-to-earnings ratios (how much the buyer must pay per dollar of the company’s profits) as a standard for judging the valuation of stocks. By that historical standard, the market is wildly overvalued and due for a painful correction. Problem is, the traditionalists have been saying so for years now, and they are starting to sound like Chicken Little. Glassman and Hassett posit that the market indices have only begun to climb, and that it’s perfectly reasonable to buy stocks at today’s nosebleed-altitude earnings multiples.

In well-crafted layman’s prose, they calculate the PRP of a few individual stocks, analyzing recent trends in earnings growth, dividend growth, and other factors that point to long-term success for the companies. By this reckoning, home mortgage giant Fannie Mae (to take one example) is worth nothing like its May 1999 price of $67 a share: its PRP could be as high as $872. The authors don’t claim that the markets as a whole will do this well, but it’s easy enough for the Dow to reach the 36,000 target if, as they assert, many stocks are currently trading well below their PRPs.

Dow 36,000 makes a cogent and convincing argument that the good times are going to roll on and on. If that’s true, readers who follow this book’s suggestions in navigating the markets will triple their money and then some. Whether it’s true or not, this intriguing book is going to be a very interesting read in five, 15, or 20 years, with its authors enshrined as either the butt of jokes or visionary geniuses.

While Glassman and Hassett don’t predict at what magic moment the Dow Jones Industrial Average will crack 36,000, Charles W. Kadlec goes further out on a limb. In Dow 100,000: Fact or Fiction, Kadlec offers a date certain for the completion of a tenfold rise in the Dow: the year 2020.

An investment strategist for a mutual fund firm, Kadlec cites some of the same optimistic reasoning as the other authors for the huge boost in stocks such as gains in productivity, improvements in management and more free global trade but his dramatic scenario of future prosperity relies more on a long view of historical economic developments than on technical analysis of equity markets. He puts the internet into context, for instance, by discussing the impact of the railroads and the telegraph in the last half of the 19th century.

Taking the long view, Kadlec is not shy about drawing a parallel between the 1990s and the 1920s the decade that ended in a cataclysmic market crash. He notes that if the Dow grows in years to come at the same rate it did in the ’20s, it will reach 100,000 by 2016. He sees no reason to consider a crash inevitable after such an explosion. Kadlec’s command of historical detail, and his talent for drawing incisive parallels between past, present, and predicted future, make this book particularly thought-provoking.

Kadlec warns that continued progress is not a sure thing. Taking a broad view of economic and social policy issues that will influence financial markets, Kadlec draws surprising conclusions about the threats that the American economy faces for instance, that Medicare is in much worse shape than Social Security and is headed for a stark choice between full coverage of those in need and fiscal solvency, and that global terrorism lurks as a risk not adequately appreciated by investors. Readers intoxicated by the vision of a six-digit Dow will find these warnings sobering.

Still, Kadlec presents an exhilarating vision of what really might be. Dow 100,000 is no fantasy: Kadlec argues persuasively that the number is attainable.

Knight Kiplinger, representing the third generation of a family that has made its living by economic forecasting in personal finance publications, weighs in with further cheerful tidings in World Boom Ahead: Why Business and Consumers Will Prosper (Kiplinger Books, $14.95, 0938721704). The first edition of this book came out just as the Asian financial crisis was spooking markets last year, but this updated paperback version is even more optimistic. Kiplinger’s focus is on the long term, and he has an authoritative command of the trends reshaping our lives.

Kiplinger is somewhat at odds with the Dow boosters, predicting a less boomy stock market in the decade to come. In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if stocks head south for a year or two in the near future, but he finds the long-term trends bright. Though he sees the U.S. economy continuing to perform very well, he says the greatest growth in the new millennium will come in the rest of the world. The author foresees a planet teeming with 1.5 billion new humans by 2020, most born in less-developed countries but that prospect doesn’t trouble him. Living standards will rise for these less-fortunate earthlings, he predicts. The real problems will come to countries with too few residents of working age. A relatively open immigration policy has already given the U.S. a competitive advantage in that department.

World Boom Ahead includes an engrossing survey of future developments in industry and society, picking the relative winners and losers of the new economy. A few samples: Traditional retailers will see the downside of chasing super-shoppers, as boomers burn out on the mall . . . In a low-inflation climate, home prices will grow less steeply than in the past . . . Four-hour supersonic trips across the Pacific, day-trading 80-year-olds and microchip-imbedded cattle all await us in Kiplinger’s 21st century.

Buck Rogers lives. If Kiplinger’s work is not enough to convince you, maybe another new release will: The Long Boom: A History of the World’s Future, 1980-2020 (Perseus Books, $26, 0738200743), by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, and Joel Hyatt a consultant, technology journalist, and Stanford business professor, respectively.

Imagine this world as the authors imagine it, viewed in hindsight from 2050: We humans have fixed the damage we had done to the environment, without denting anyone’s standard of living. Cars now run on hydrogen fuel cells refilled twice a year. Machines the size of molecules and 120-year life spans are realities for today’s George and Jane Jetsons, and nothing is out of the realm of possibility not cold fusion energy, not anti-gravity devices, not cooperation with alien life forms.

This is a mind-boggling book.

These authors see the present moment as a watershed in human history. Emerging technologies and new modes of deploying human capital, they argue, are in the process of bringing about an unprecedented leap in the progress of civilization. If we can all get it right, the result will be good times throughout the planet we currently inhabit and beyond.

There will be bumps in the road the overthrow of Saudi Arabia’s government by Islamic fundamentalists will cause another oil shock in the economy, for instance. But an evolving civilization, in which all peoples are bound together by common interests and increasingly shared prosperity, will be able to work through such rough patches, in the view of Schwartz, Leyden, and Hyatt.

Like all the authors mentioned here, though perhaps to a far greater degree, The Long Boom’s visionaries have taken on the risk of being ridiculed, now or in the future. But their well-reasoned speculations, and the acrobatic dexterity with which they have stretched their minds, will not be ignored.

Briefly noted: Tom Peters, the personal trainer of American business writing, wants to pump you up. Brash visions of the new millennium are obviously in vogue this month, and Peters offers his own in a new series of books. Just out are The Brand You 50 (Alfred A. Knopf, $16.95, 0375407723), The Projects 50 ($16.95, 0375407731), and The Professional Service Firm 50 ($16.95, 0375407715). In his trademark style of breathless exhortation, Peters inspires readers to embrace the new realities of the evolving workplace and to turn themselves into sought-after brand names on the job. ¦ Journalist E. Thomas Wood is an editor with the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture magazines.

Ah, October. Leaves turning, football crowds cheering, developing economies tanking, stock markets crashing. The memories return every autumn, with Proustian clarity. At any time of the year, it would take a certain chutzpah to claim that the wild bull market of the 1990s is going to keep charging higher and higher. But to do so in October is to exhibit either reckless disregard for history or brilliantly prescient foresight. Or both.

Yet here they are, just in time to make perfect anniversary gifts for those commemorating the stock market disasters of October 1929, October 1987, or October 1998: Four brave books that claim the best is yet to come for investors and the general economy.

Believe it or not, the least audacious of these titles may be Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market (Soundelux audio, abridged, $17.95, 1559353260), by James K. Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett. I confess I’m always skeptical about books of prognostication, whether they are optimistic or full of gloom and doom. (Remember Ravi Batra’s The Great Depression of 1990? It’s out of print now, but Batra soldiers on: his latest work is Crash of the Millennium: Surviving the Coming Inflationary Depression from Harmony Books.) And yet Dow 36,000, with its intricate but lucidly argued analyses, has just about won me over.

Every prospectus churned out by a publicly traded company or mutual fund includes a mantra that’s about as meaningful as cigarette-pack labels or instructions on how to use one’s seat cushion as a floatation device: Previous performance is no guarantee of future results. Washington Post columnist Glassman and think-tank scholar Hassett take these words at face value. Evaluating stocks by historical measures, they claim, ignores their true, latent strength.

The authors offer a new yardstick for measuring the markets: Perfectly Reasonable Price. The PRP is the price a long-term investor would be willing to pay for an investment. Traditionalists in the investment world use price-to-earnings ratios (how much the buyer must pay per dollar of the company’s profits) as a standard for judging the valuation of stocks. By that historical standard, the market is wildly overvalued and due for a painful correction. Problem is, the traditionalists have been saying so for years now, and they are starting to sound like Chicken Little. Glassman and Hassett posit that the market indices have only begun to climb, and that it’s perfectly reasonable to buy stocks at today’s nosebleed-altitude earnings multiples.

In well-crafted layman’s prose, they calculate the PRP of a few individual stocks, analyzing recent trends in earnings growth, dividend growth, and other factors that point to long-term success for the companies. By this reckoning, home mortgage giant Fannie Mae (to take one example) is worth nothing like its May 1999 price of $67 a share: its PRP could be as high as $872. The authors don’t claim that the markets as a whole will do this well, but it’s easy enough for the Dow to reach the 36,000 target if, as they assert, many stocks are currently trading well below their PRPs.

Dow 36,000 makes a cogent and convincing argument that the good times are going to roll on and on. If that’s true, readers who follow this book’s suggestions in navigating the markets will triple their money and then some. Whether it’s true or not, this intriguing book is going to be a very interesting read in five, 15, or 20 years, with its authors enshrined as either the butt of jokes or visionary geniuses.

While Glassman and Hassett don’t predict at what magic moment the Dow Jones Industrial Average will crack 36,000, Charles W. Kadlec goes further out on a limb. In Dow 100,000: Fact or Fiction (Prentice Hall, $25, 0735201374), Kadlec offers a date certain for the completion of a tenfold rise in the Dow: the year 2020.

An investment strategist for a mutual fund firm, Kadlec cites some of the same optimistic reasoning as the other authors for the huge boost in stocks such as gains in productivity, improvements in management and more free global trade but his dramatic scenario of future prosperity relies more on a long view of historical economic developments than on technical analysis of equity markets. He puts the internet into context, for instance, by discussing the impact of the railroads and the telegraph in the last half of the 19th century.

Taking the long view, Kadlec is not shy about drawing a parallel between the 1990s and the 1920s the decade that ended in a cataclysmic market crash. He notes that if the Dow grows in years to come at the same rate it did in the ’20s, it will reach 100,000 by 2016. He sees no reason to consider a crash inevitable after such an explosion. Kadlec’s command of historical detail, and his talent for drawing incisive parallels between past, present, and predicted future, make this book particularly thought-provoking.

Kadlec warns that continued progress is not a sure thing. Taking a broad view of economic and social policy issues that will influence financial markets, Kadlec draws surprising conclusions about the threats that the American economy faces for instance, that Medicare is in much worse shape than Social Security and is headed for a stark choice between full coverage of those in need and fiscal solvency, and that global terrorism lurks as a risk not adequately appreciated by investors. Readers intoxicated by the vision of a six-digit Dow will find these warnings sobering.

Still, Kadlec presents an exhilarating vision of what really might be. Dow 100,000 is no fantasy: Kadlec argues persuasively that the number is attainable.

Knight Kiplinger, representing the third generation of a family that has made its living by economic forecasting in personal finance publications, weighs in with further cheerful tidings in World Boom Ahead: Why Business and Consumers Will Prosper (Kiplinger Books, $14.95, 0938721704). The first edition of this book came out just as the Asian financial crisis was spooking markets last year, but this updated paperback version is even more optimistic. Kiplinger’s focus is on the long term, and he has an authoritative command of the trends reshaping our lives.

Kiplinger is somewhat at odds with the Dow boosters, predicting a less boomy stock market in the decade to come. In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if stocks head south for a year or two in the near future, but he finds the long-term trends bright. Though he sees the U.S. economy continuing to perform very well, he says the greatest growth in the new millennium will come in the rest of the world. The author foresees a planet teeming with 1.5 billion new humans by 2020, most born in less-developed countries but that prospect doesn’t trouble him. Living standards will rise for these less-fortunate earthlings, he predicts. The real problems will come to countries with too few residents of working age. A relatively open immigration policy has already given the U.S. a competitive advantage in that department.

World Boom Ahead includes an engrossing survey of future developments in industry and society, picking the relative winners and losers of the new economy. A few samples: Traditional retailers will see the downside of chasing super-shoppers, as boomers burn out on the mall . . . In a low-inflation climate, home prices will grow less steeply than in the past . . . Four-hour supersonic trips across the Pacific, day-trading 80-year-olds and microchip-imbedded cattle all await us in Kiplinger’s 21st century.

Buck Rogers lives. If Kiplinger’s work is not enough to convince you, maybe another new release will: The Long Boom: A History of the World’s Future, 1980-2020 (Perseus Books, $26, 0738200743), by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, and Joel Hyatt a consultant, technology journalist, and Stanford business professor, respectively.

Imagine this world as the authors imagine it, viewed in hindsight from 2050: We humans have fixed the damage we had done to the environment, without denting anyone’s standard of living. Cars now run on hydrogen fuel cells refilled twice a year. Machines the size of molecules and 120-year life spans are realities for today’s George and Jane Jetsons, and nothing is out of the realm of possibility not cold fusion energy, not anti-gravity devices, not cooperation with alien life forms.

This is a mind-boggling book.

These authors see the present moment as a watershed in human history. Emerging technologies and new modes of deploying human capital, they argue, are in the process of bringing about an unprecedented leap in the progress of civilization. If we can all get it right, the result will be good times throughout the planet we currently inhabit and beyond.

There will be bumps in the road the overthrow of Saudi Arabia’s government by Islamic fundamentalists will cause another oil shock in the economy, for instance. But an evolving civilization, in which all peoples are bound together by common interests and increasingly shared prosperity, will be able to work through such rough patches, in the view of Schwartz, Leyden, and Hyatt.

Like all the authors mentioned here, though perhaps to a far greater degree, The Long Boom’s visionaries have taken on the risk of being ridiculed, now or in the future. But their well-reasoned speculations, and the acrobatic dexterity with which they have stretched their minds, will not be ignored.

Briefly noted: Tom Peters, the personal trainer of American business writing, wants to pump you up. Brash visions of the new millennium are obviously in vogue this month, and Peters offers his own in a new series of books. Just out are The Brand You 50 (Alfred A. Knopf, $16.95, 0375407723), The Projects 50 ($16.95, 0375407731), and The Professional Service Firm 50 ($16.95, 0375407715). In his trademark style of breathless exhortation, Peters inspires readers to embrace the new realities of the evolving workplace and to turn themselves into sought-after brand names on the job. ¦ Journalist E. Thomas Wood is an editor with the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture magazines.

Books for grown-up baby boomers If you’ve been watching closely, you’ve noticed that members of the generation born between 1946 and 1964 are often now simply called boomers rather than the more formal baby boomers, as they used to be known. Sure, the simple boomers is snappier and hipper-sounding. It’s also a lot more accurate. That’s because the generation whose size, influence, and self-referential world view has altered every aspect of American life is certainly not babyish anymore. (A note of disclosure: I’m a card-carrying member of the boomer group.) The boomers are now finding (often to their utter surprise) that they are all grown up and not fully prepared to finance and emotionally weather such important life milestones as their children’s higher education and their own approaching retirement. Some new books are here to help.

The generation that keeps on ticking Don’t Stop the Career Clock: Rejecting the Myths of Aging for a New Way to Work in the 21st Century by Helen Harkness (Davies-Black Publishing, $17.95, 0891061274) is a blast of optimism for 40-something boomers and those even later in life who think they are on the downhill slope. Harkness, a career counselor, successfully bursts many of the stereotypes of aging that equate the addition of years with mental and physical deterioration and a loss of value in the work world. She tells people to focus on their functional ages, not their chronological ones. At one point she writes: The greatest of all remedies for the fear of age and death is a burning desire for achievement, backed by useful service to others. Busy people seldom have time to worry about dying. Harkness spends time in this book examining medical studies that refute myths about age and links to mental and physical decline. She also offers practical advice, with checklists and exercises, for people interested in a mid-life career switch or a chance to go into business for themselves. In an interesting note on the age 65, still considered by many a magical number at which time people should close up the working portion of their lives, Harkness writes: In the 1930s, when the U.S. government was establishing the age for receiving Social Security benefits, 65 was adopted as the age for retirement. This was a time when life expectancy was around 45 and the unemployment rate was 25 percent. How mindless can this be for today’s work force, with life expectancy at 78 and rising rapidly, and unemployment at its lowest level in 25 years? Finding financial security Okay, so your retirement won’t be as traditional as that of your parents. Still, you’ll need some extra financial security as you grow older to give you greater flexibility and allow you to slow down your work schedule if that’s what you want. Don’t know where to start on that complicated trail? A good place is If You’re Clueless About Financial Planning and Want to Know More by Seth Godin and John Parmelee. The book lives up to the promise inherent in its title in that it doesn’t assume much prior knowledge and does provide good basic instruction. The range of subjects is quite wide, from different types of stock and bond investments to life insurance to college financial aid and more. Given the subject range, none of the topics gets in-depth treatment, but there are many referrals about where to find more information in other books and via the Internet.

Retiring comfortably It’s become an accepted axiom that people retiring in the next quarter-century will need a lot more than Social Security payments to comfortably support themselves. The demographic swell of boomers hitting retirement age around the year 2015 will put unprecedented pressure on the Social Security system. Debate is already under way in Washington, D.C., about ways to save or reform the system. Meanwhile, surveys of younger people reveal deep skepticism about what will be left for them when they reach retirement age, despite lifetimes of contributions. While urging people to assume that Social Security will not form the lion’s share of their retirement income, John F. Wasik, author of The Late-Start Investor: The Better-Late-Than-Never Guide to Realizing Your Retirement Dreams (Henry Holt, $14.95, 0805055029), makes interesting points that should serve to dispel the worst doom and gloom about the future of Social Security.

Wasik writes: Why does anyone in Washington think the 77-million-strong baby boom generation will want less from these programs after they worked so hard to make retirement a pleasant, more financially secure experience? If anything, given the selfishness traditionally ascribed to the me generation, they will want more out of retirement programs, not less. And as this generation gains power in politics, you will see a huge decrease in the political ill will toward big government programs. Wasik, special projects editor for Consumers Digest magazine, provides a balanced, common-sensical approach toward finding a New Prosperity as one approaches retirement. He urges reduced spending to increase the amount of money available for investing; an inventory to make sure you know exactly what you have and what your sources of income are; and growth-oriented investments that take advantage of any tax deferments available. Wasik goes beyond the purely financial and offers advice on how to make later life more balanced and rewarding.

As for investments, Wasik is not afraid to get specific. In a section on mutual funds, he offers recommendations for portfolios for people at different stages of life, including those with as little as five years remaining to retirement. Wasik takes the widely held view that the closer one is to retirement, the less risk he or she should carry in their investments. For those interested in their own investment decisions, Wasik offers specific individual stock recommendations.

Homeward bound Perhaps your later-in-life plans don’t include a total cessation of work, but you would like to shift gears, or, at a minimum, reduce your daily commute. The trip to work doesn’t get any shorter than when you work at home. It’s a growing trend likely to gain even more momentum in the 21st century as technological advances allow people in more occupations to work from home. Work at Home Wisdom: A Collection of Quips, Tips, and Inspirations to Balance Work, Family, and Home by David H. Bangs, Jr., and Andi Axman (Upstart Publishing Co., $9.95, 1574101005) takes a look at the human side of at-home work. Light on the practical aspects of working at home such as tax implications and equipment needed (that’s left to countless other books), the authors instead focus on how to stay sane and prosperous while going it alone. Among the salient pieces of advice offered in the book: Keep your work confined to your home office and don’t let it spread around the house. That will give you a better chance at maintaining the separation between the personal and professional when both cohabit the same domicile. The authors also urge stay-at-homes to set clear guidelines with those they live with about when they are allowed to be disturbed during working hours. (They offer: a fire, a flood, blood, and so on. ) The book is also good on ways to fight the loneliness that can plague the at-home worker. (The authors know the territory from personal experience; both are writers who run their own at-home shows.) They suggest ways to increase human contact that can also be productive for business and personal growth. Staying at home is increasingly a route to business success. Consider this fact offered by the authors: An astonishing 45 percent of the companies in the Inc. [magazine] 500 list were started in their founder’s residence . . . Neal Lipschutz is managing editor of Dow Jones News Service.

The psychology of money and work Twenty years ago, personal finance writer Andrew Tobias produced a best-selling book with a boastful title. It was called The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need. Rather than scare away the competition with that all-encompassing name, the book’s huge success may have helped spark what’s become a growth industry unto itself: the avalanche of books intended to provide care and feeding to the emboldened individual investor. In 1978, very few people actively controlled their own investments, from automated payroll savings to retirement accounts. In 1978, there was no CNBC, no Internet stock trading, not even any Internet stocks to trade. In 1978, the mutual fund industry was a fraction of its current size. Given the enormous change that’s engulfed the world of personal finance, Mr. Tobias decided it was time to return to his original theme. So we have The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need: Expanded and Updated Throughout (Harvest Books, $13, 0156005603). As for the compelling title, Mr. Tobias says it was his publisher’s idea, and he agreed in a weak moment. He notes that there are other good investment guides around (and many poor ones), but accurately adds: . . . reading three good investment guides instead of one will surely not triple, and probably not even improve, your investment results. So how does Mr. Tobias’s one-stop shopping site for investors hold up? Quite well. The author is a knowledgeable guide and a gifted writer. The book is a pleasure to read, which is important since so many people regard reading about investment options as an unpleasant if important chore. He covers most of the waterfront, and he is forthright in his opinions. For example, he doesn’t think much of investing in commodities or gold. On commodities, he writes: It is a fact that 90% or more of the people who play the commodities game get burned. I submit that you have now read all that you need ever read about commodities. On gold he offers, Gold itself pays no interest and costs money to insure. It is a hedge against inflation, all right, and a handy way to buy passage to Liechtenstein, or wherever it is we’re all supposed to flee to when the much ballyhooed collapse finally materializes. But if you’re looking for an inflation hedge, you might do better with stocks or real estate. Mr. Tobias is particularly strong in an area many people wouldn’t consider the province of an investment guide: frugality. Simply stated, spending less of your income is a great savings and investment strategy. Given effective tax rates, keeping an after-tax dollar in your pocket rather than in some merchant’s cash register is probably the equivalent of going out and earning two dollars before taxes. The author advises buying in bulk and hard bargaining on big purchases. He takes the reader through the pros and cons of most investment options in an engaging, common sense manner.

Every investor is different, of course. Mr. Tobias, for one, describes himself as rather chickenhearted. People should take on levels of risk that are not only appropriate for their income, goals, and stage of life, but also in line with their psychological ability to withstand risk. In other words, you want your investments to allow you to sleep at night.

Despite our differences, there are some psychological foibles most of us share when it comes to thinking about money. That’s the subject of a fascinating new book, Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes and How to Correct Them by Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich. The authors (Belsky is a journalist who wrote for Money magazine for seven years; Gilovich is a professor of psychology at Cornell University) take us into the world of psychoeconomic theory, which explains how widespread human behavior patterns have an adverse impact on our pocketbooks.

Take the concept of mental accounting, which deals with how we categorize money and treat it differently depending on its source. For example, we more easily fritter away money that was won at the racetrack the night before than we would rashly spend the contents of our hard-earned paychecks. Like other ideas of psychoeconomic theory, the various aspects of mental accounting are presented here through hypothetical scenarios in which readers can participate. This fun approach makes the issues at hand easy to identify with and clear. The bottom line solution to the mental accounting problem is this: Make sure you treat each dollar in your possession equally, no matter whence it came. This popularization of the work of psychologists hits on many interesting issues, including the fact that losses hurt more than gains please. That makes a lot of people more risk averse in their investment decisions than rational investigation would likely lead them to be. And then there’s the sobering fact that most of us are not as smart or as savvy as we imagine. The authors write: . . . for almost as long as psychologists have been exploring human nature, they have been amassing evidence that people tend to overestimate their own abilities, knowledge, and skills . . . in financial matters the tendency to place too much stock in what you know, or what you think you know, can cost you dearly. For most of these interesting tendencies, knowledge that they exist can help you fight them. The authors of this well-researched and clearly written book also offer specific remedies for the financial aspects of these psychological peccadilloes.

Psychology doesn’t abandon us once we put away the bills or monthly investment statements; it accompanies us to work (and everywhere else, for that matter). The ability to cooperate, collaborate, and even inspire our colleagues is a crucial factor in our own personal success as well as in the prosperity of our employer. In 1995, Daniel Goleman wrote a bestseller called Emotional Intelligence, which challenged the dominance of the IQ in measuring smarts. Now he’s taken those concepts to work in Working with Emotional Intelligence (Bantam, $25.95, 0553104624; Audio Renaissance, abridged, $16.95, 1559275154; unabridged, $39.95, 1559275162). Goleman received a doctorate from Harvard University and spent a dozen years covering behavioral and brain sciences for the New York Times. His essential message is an upbeat one: Those qualities that in an earlier time might have been labeled character or made one considered a good person are also the qualities that should help us get ahead at work.

There’s more good news. Your fate isn’t determined by some stagnant measure of your intelligence; you can improve on your emotional intelligence at any stage of life. In today’s work world, hierarchies have been flattened and the success of team work often depends on people’s ability to get along. Emotional intelligence has never been more important.

In readable detail, based on research and corporate profiles, Goleman lays out the personal competencies of emotional intelligence, which include self-awareness, self-regulation, and motivation, as well as social competencies, such as empathy and social skills. (Each category has more specific sub-categories.) This is an important and helpful book.

The changes in the American workplace in the past couple of decades haven’t all taken place within our heads. One seismic change has been the vastly expanded role of women in the work force, both in terms of number and influence. That change is the subject of Powerchicks: How Women Will Dominate America (Longstreet, $22, 1563525216) by Matt Towery. For a book about the growing strength of women in business, entertainment, and politics, as well as their dominant place as consumers and voters, the title strikes one as a tad irreverent. Mr. Towery, a former Georgia state legislator, says, however, that many influential women have willingly and proudly accepted the new term. As for why a man wrote this book, the author cites an old newspaper adage, to wit, You don’t have to die to be qualified to write obituaries. Mr. Towery has produced a glowing testament to women in a host of industries who have made it to the top or near top. Through numerous interviews, they tell of their motivations and of obstacles overcome. Among the many interesting points made are that corporate inflexibility might partly be behind the surge in female entrepreneurship and the description of a social phenomena he calls the female bachelor. This describes high-income, high-status single women with lots of disposable income who don’t feel pressured to marry.

Neal Lipschutz is managing editor of Dow Jones News Service.

Lately it seems as though all my friends are either getting rich or grousing about not getting rich while everyone else is. With the stock market and the overall economy steaming through yet another year of almost obscene prosperity, many Americans are rolling in the dough while others try to figure out how to get a taste of it.

There are new books out for both sorts of people: those who want to make the best of the money they have, and those still struggling to build up a nest egg. This month’s featured books cover how to start investing in the future, how to pick hot stocks, which hot stocks to pick, and what to do with all that moolah after retirement.

Let’s start simply. In Wealth Happens One Day at a Time: 365 Days to a Brighter Financial Future (HarperBusiness, $19.95, 0887309828), Brooke M. Stephens offers a combination of advice, affirmations, and action to demystify the process of reaching financial security. Like Dave Ramsey and other authors who address the basics of creating personal wealth, Stephens tells readers they can gain greater control over their lives by getting control of money.

It’s only natural for some people to feel intimidated about all the flashy wealth on display these days. This book is a self-help course in overcoming financial intimidation. One day at a time, it will help readers master the concepts of saving and investing even as they master their own emotions about money. Its 365 mini-essays move from the simplest of topics to such complex issues as Roth IRAs and testamentary trusts all explained in a breezy style with plenty of enlightening anecdotes.

Wealth Happens is a valuable road-map to personal enrichment. If you or people you care about have been meaning to get control of finances but just haven’t figured out where to start this book may be the highest-yielding investment you ever make.

Graduates of Stephens’s tutorial in personal financial management can move on to the small time with Gene Walden’s The 100 Best Stocks to Own for Under $20 (Dearborn, $19.95, 0887309828). Not every stock on Walden’s list is a small company, but most are small enough to have stayed off the radar screens of Wall Street know-it-alls in recent years. The author has applied sophisticated technical analysis to screen through the more than 8,000 stocks trading at more than $20 a share, finding a final 100 that excelled by a broad range of performance measures.

Imagine the rewards that can come from taking risks. Somewhere out there is the next Microsoft, priced today as cheaply as Bill Gates’s fledgling company was in 1987. A $10,000 investment then would be worth $1 million now. Walden argues convincingly that small stocks have been the 20th century’s most lucrative form of investment, and he makes a compelling case that his 100 picks are the hottest performers in this hot category. At a time when the true value of many high-flying stocks is very much open to question, Walden’s research can help investors find the market’s hidden gems.

Global Bargain Hunting: The Investor’s Guide to Profits in Emerging Markets traces another route to riches for intrepid investors. It’s true that the Asian financial crisis gave all emerging markets a bad name in 1998, soon after the first edition of this book came out, but the turmoil did nothing to shake the faith of authors Burton Malkiel and J.P. Mei in the less-developed world’s markets. Their new paperback edition incorporates the wisdom gained from the Asian experience and points stock-buyers toward the opportunities that abound in its wake.

Unlike Walden, Malkiel and Mei focus more on how to pick the right international stocks than on which stocks to pick. They devote plenty of attention to the pitfalls of investing in emerging markets, which range from high transaction costs to underdeveloped stock markets to corruption and even the risk of government expropriation. And they discuss which types of investment are and are not suitable for the typical individual buyer.

Like Walden, Global Bargain Hunting’s authors crunch numbers to reveal true values in the market that most investors could never discover on their own. You don’t have to be a math wizard to be persuaded by their valuation formulas, such as a calculation of domestic-growth-to-price/earnings ratios in ten nations that ranks the U.S., with its overheated stock market, dead last in investment values and Poland first. The message: Sell apple pie short; go long on kielbasa.

Malkiel and Mei explain complicated financial concepts in simple and clear language. They are admirably blunt about some of the dirty secrets of Wall Street, offering such insider warnings as: Initial public offerings of closed-end [mutual fund] shares are usually a rip-off. And, as Malkiel advocated (controversially at the time) in 1973’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street (6th edition 1996, W.W. Norton, $15.95, 0393315290), the authors tend to favor indexed funds over managed funds for international investors.

Global Bargain Hunting makes a strong case for buying into the developing world, even with all the financial hazards involved. Investors wary of buying at the top of the U.S. market will find this book a worthwhile form of armchair traveling.

So, suppose you profit from the advice of all three of these authors. Enjoy the warm, fuzzy feeling of success while you can, because what comes after it is the realization that you really have something to lose now. Margaret A. Malaspina wants to help you cope with your riches. Don’t Die Broke: How to Turn Your Retirement Savings Into Lasting Income (Bloomberg Press, $21.95, 1576600688) is Malaspina’s guide to a topic that Baby Boomers and others may not have thought about much as they squirreled away savings in 401(k) and IRA plans over the years: managing those accumulated, and often half-forgotten, assets before and during retirement.

Malaspina, who helped make fund manager Peter Lynch a superstar when she was a communications executive with Fidelity Investments, displays a thorough grasp of the wickedly arcane rules that govern retirement savings, especially when it comes time to start withdrawing them. Just as importantly, she finds ways to help ordinary readers understand those rules and what can happen when retirees inadvertently break them. The horror stories here, about incredibly damaging financial decisions made by smart people acting in good faith, will suffice to focus the minds of future retirees on what they have at stake.

Don’t Die Broke is not just for people approaching retirement age, either. Anyone, of any age, who inherits retirement-plan assets may face a bewildering series of choices, with little guidance from the IRS or the trustee holding the assets. Your heirs may wish you had died broke before it’s all over and, in fact, Malaspina contradicts her book’s title by offering sage advice on how to do just that. Effective estate planning, which may need to begin sooner in life than many would think, can shift enough assets out of an estate to avoid large tax burdens.

Malaspina’s work is important reading for any American who is saving for the future, because it hammers home the uncomfortable fact that just saving money is not enough. Every retirement account needs a game plan as well, and Don’t Die Broke will empower its readers to create solid strategies.

Briefly noted: Money, Greed, and Risk: Why Financial Crises and Crashes Happen, by Charles R. Morris (Times Books, $25, 0812931734), is a salutary reminder, in these heady times, of what can go wrong in the financial markets. Morris deftly surveys America’s two-century history of occasional busts, panics, and market hiccups, skewering the hubris almost always at the core of a financial disaster. In Succeeding Generations: Realizing the Dream of Families in Business (Harvard Business School Press, $35, 0875847420), Ivan Lansberg offers insightful case studies and astute analysis to guide parents, siblings, and other relatives through the tricky business of succession planning in a family company.

One of this month’s most intriguing works (remember, intrigue can have more than one meaning) is a former U.S. military spy’s primer on corporate espionage. Confidential: Uncover Your Competitor’s Secrets Legally and Quickly and Protect Your Own (HarperBusiness, $26, 006661984X), by John Nolan, provides chilling glimpses into the cloak-and-dagger world of finding out (and protecting) companies’ most valuable secrets.

And finally, aspiring tycoons can choose from among 50 potential role models in Lessons from the Top: The Search for America’s Best Business Leaders (Doubleday, $24.95, 0385493436 on sale August 17). Authors Thomas J. Neff and James M. Citrin, both executive search specialists, have finely honed their instincts for finding good leaders, and their chosen honchos sound off on life at the top in revealing interviews.

Journalist E. Thomas Wood is an editor with the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture magazines.

One of the great issues facing couples with children is the work/family crunch. There never seems to be enough time or energy to do everything well (or even passably). Most often women bear the brunt of this dilemma, handling the bulk of child-rearing and housecleaning responsibilities while more and more also hold full-time jobs. Sure there are exceptions, but they are still just that. In Two Incomes and Still Broke? It’s Not How Much You Make, It’s How Much You Keep author Linda Kelley doesn’t take sides in the cultural/sociological battle about whether both parents should work. Obviously, economics are a compelling factor for many. What Ms. Kelley does offer is a detailed look at the real, after-tax, after-job-related-expenses financial benefit of a second wage earner in the family. She offers worksheets to help you figure out your own situation. The bottom line is that second incomes usually net less than they seem.

Though she doesn’t take sides, readers might conclude that Ms. Kelley’s own route (part-time work as a second earner) is the most financially logical and perhaps a better parenting choice. But the author insists the spouse most often at home also has to do heavy lifting on serious household budgeting and comparison shopping (some would say penny pinching). It’s not a universally desirable lifestyle. This book will make you take a hard look at what it costs to work, not just work’s financial rewards.

Neal Lipschutz is managing editor of Dow Jones News Service.

Books for grown-up baby boomers If you’ve been watching closely, you’ve noticed that members of the generation born between 1946 and 1964 are often now simply called boomers rather than the more formal baby boomers, as they used to be known. Sure, the simple boomers is snappier and hipper-sounding. It’s also a lot more accurate. That’s because the generation whose size, influence, and self-referential world view has altered every aspect of American life is certainly not babyish anymore. (A note of disclosure: I’m a card-carrying member of the boomer group.) The boomers are now finding (often to their utter surprise) that they are all grown up and not fully prepared to finance and emotionally weather such important life milestones as their children’s higher education and their own approaching retirement. Some new books are here to help.

The generation that keeps on ticking Don’t Stop the Career Clock: Rejecting the Myths of Aging for a New Way to Work in the 21st Century by Helen Harkness (Davies-Black Publishing, $17.95, 0891061274) is a blast of optimism for 40-something boomers and those even later in life who think they are on the downhill slope. Harkness, a career counselor, successfully bursts many of the stereotypes of aging that equate the addition of years with mental and physical deterioration and a loss of value in the work world. She tells people to focus on their functional ages, not their chronological ones. At one point she writes: The greatest of all remedies for the fear of age and death is a burning desire for achievement, backed by useful service to others. Busy people seldom have time to worry about dying. Harkness spends time in this book examining medical studies that refute myths about age and links to mental and physical decline. She also offers practical advice, with checklists and exercises, for people interested in a mid-life career switch or a chance to go into business for themselves. In an interesting note on the age 65, still considered by many a magical number at which time people should close up the working portion of their lives, Harkness writes: In the 1930s, when the U.

S. government was establishing the age for receiving Social Security benefits, 65 was adopted as the age for retirement. This was a time when life expectancy was around 45 and the unemployment rate was 25 percent. How mindless can this be for today’s work force, with life expectancy at 78 and rising rapidly, and unemployment at its lowest level in 25 years? Finding financial security Okay, so your retirement won’t be as traditional as that of your parents. Still, you’ll need some extra financial security as you grow older to give you greater flexibility and allow you to slow down your work schedule if that’s what you want. Don’t know where to start on that complicated trail? A good place is If You’re Clueless About Financial Planning and Want to Know More by Seth Godin and John Parmelee (Dearborn, $15.95, 0793129885). The book lives up to the promise inherent in its title in that it doesn’t assume much prior knowledge and does provide good basic instruction. The range of subjects is quite wide, from different types of stock and bond investments to life insurance to college financial aid and more. Given the subject range, none of the topics gets in-depth treatment, but there are many referrals about where to find more information in other books and via the Internet.

Retiring comfortably It’s become an accepted axiom that people retiring in the next quarter-century will need a lot more than Social Security payments to comfortably support themselves. The demographic swell of boomers hitting retirement age around the year 2015 will put unprecedented pressure on the Social Security system. Debate is already under way in Washington, D.C., about ways to save or reform the system. Meanwhile, surveys of younger people reveal deep skepticism about what will be left for them when they reach retirement age, despite lifetimes of contributions. While urging people to assume that Social Security will not form the lion’s share of their retirement income, John F. Wasik, author of The Late-Start Investor: The Better-Late-Than-Never Guide to Realizing Your Retirement Dreams, makes interesting points that should serve to dispel the worst doom and gloom about the future of Social Security.

Wasik writes: Why does anyone in Washington think the 77-million-strong baby boom generation will want less from these programs after they worked so hard to make retirement a pleasant, more financially secure experience? If anything, given the selfishness traditionally ascribed to the me generation, they will want more out of retirement programs, not less. And as this generation gains power in politics, you will see a huge decrease in the political ill will toward big government programs. Wasik, special projects editor for Consumers Digest magazine, provides a balanced, common-sensical approach toward finding a New Prosperity as one approaches retirement. He urges reduced spending to increase the amount of money available for investing; an inventory to make sure you know exactly what you have and what your sources of income are; and growth-oriented investments that take advantage of any tax deferments available. Wasik goes beyond the purely financial and offers advice on how to make later life more balanced and rewarding.

As for investments, Wasik is not afraid to get specific. In a section on mutual funds, he offers recommendations for portfolios for people at different stages of life, including those with as little as five years remaining to retirement. Wasik takes the widely held view that the closer one is to retirement, the less risk he or she should carry in their investments. For those interested in their own investment decisions, Wasik offers specific individual stock recommendations.

Homeward bound Perhaps your later-in-life plans don’t include a total cessation of work, but you would like to shift gears, or, at a minimum, reduce your daily commute. The trip to work doesn’t get any shorter than when you work at home. It’s a growing trend likely to gain even more momentum in the 21st century as technological advances allow people in more occupations to work from home. Work at Home Wisdom: A Collection of Quips, Tips, and Inspirations to Balance Work, Family, and Home by David H. Bangs, Jr., and Andi Axman (Upstart Publishing Co., $9.95, 1574101005) takes a look at the human side of at-home work. Light on the practical aspects of working at home such as tax implications and equipment needed (that’s left to countless other books), the authors instead focus on how to stay sane and prosperous while going it alone. Among the salient pieces of advice offered in the book: Keep your work confined to your home office and don’t let it spread around the house. That will give you a better chance at maintaining the separation between the personal and professional when both cohabit the same domicile. The authors also urge stay-at-homes to set clear guidelines with those they live with about when they are allowed to be disturbed during working hours. (They offer: a fire, a flood, blood, and so on. ) The book is also good on ways to fight the loneliness that can plague the at-home worker. (The authors know the territory from personal experience; both are writers who run their own at-home shows.) They suggest ways to increase human contact that can also be productive for business and personal growth. Staying at home is increasingly a route to business success. Consider this fact offered by the authors: An astonishing 45 percent of the companies in the Inc. [magazine] 500 list were started in their founder’s residence . . . Neal Lipschutz is managing editor of Dow Jones News Service.

The hard work of making a living The unifying theme for this month’s column is work, but the term is broadly defined. A lot of choice, opportunity, conflict, change, and just plain worry can fit under the heading of making a living. We’ll feature a book on the role of office romances in the 1990s; one on business successes on the Internet; and another on perhaps the biggest workplace pressure-cooker in the capitalist system: the rooms, floors, pits, and exchanges where stocks, bonds, and every imaginable financial instrument is traded.

A fourth book is about how we work, but it covers much broader ground than that. It’s about how we live and the impact of the lack of permanence on our lives. It’s really not a new book at all, but it is a new and interesting publishing idea. Here it is in a nutshell: take a book published 30 years ago that was forward-looking and amazingly prescient. Have the authors write a new forward and new chapter introductions. The title explains the subject matter, and like much else in this intriguing book it reads like it could have been written yesterday, rather than in 1968, when it was actually penned. It’s called The Temporary Society: What Is Happening to Business and Family Life in America Under the Impact of Accelerating Change, by Warren Bennis and Philip Slater.

If nothing else, the re-release of this book proves the value of books that gaze into the future. People in business (or those just looking out for their own careers) have a big stake in anticipating economic and social trends. Those who get in early on seismic changes in technology and social attitudes can often reap huge rewards. Of course, not all predictive tomes are as on-target as this one (which is probably why they aren’t being re-released). But predicting the future is a preoccupation of many writers, and even if all else fails, such books are usually fun to read.

Warren Bennis, an author and a professor of business administration at the University of Southern California, and Philip Slater, an author and former professor of sociology at Brandeis University, were on the money about two mega-trends that have convulsed American business and society. They are the growing impermanence of employment relationships and the democratization of the business and political world. They even wrote this 30 years ago: . . . there is considerable evidence that autocracy is beginning to decay in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. It took a while, but how’s that for spotting a trend? Why is democracy breaking out in the world and in the workplace? The authors posit that in a world where change becomes the only constant, bureaucracy and autocracy break down. In 1968 they wrote: . . . democracy in industry is not an idealistic conception but a hard necessity in those areas in which change is ever-present and in which creative scientific enterprise must be nourished. For democracy is the only system of organization that is compatible with perpetual change. Slater makes the interesting case that the American family is uniquely suited for adapting to change. Where parents might find in their growing children a simple lack of respect for their elders, Slater sees a silver lining. He says young people’s general lack of commitment to the status quo and their own long-standing heritage help them in a world of technological and social change. Fewer people get tied to the past and rendered unable to go with the flow. Meanwhile, Bennis readily concedes in a forward to the final chapter that the authors didn’t get everything right 30 years ago. He says they came up short on discussing the shadowy side of change, including the human cost in sense of security and sense of worth. Nor did they foresee the problems of the underclass or predict the huge role women now play in the economy and the workplace.

Neal Lipschutz is managing editor of Dow Jones News Service.

The psychology of money and work Twenty years ago, personal finance writer Andrew Tobias produced a best-selling book with a boastful title. It was called The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need. Rather than scare away the competition with that all-encompassing name, the book’s huge success may have helped spark what’s become a growth industry unto itself: the avalanche of books intended to provide care and feeding to the emboldened individual investor. In 1978, very few people actively controlled their own investments, from automated payroll savings to retirement accounts. In 1978, there was no CNBC, no Internet stock trading, not even any Internet stocks to trade. In 1978, the mutual fund industry was a fraction of its current size. Given the enormous change that’s engulfed the world of personal finance, Mr. Tobias decided it was time to return to his original theme. So we have The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need: Expanded and Updated Throughout (Harvest Books, $13, 0156005603). As for the compelling title, Mr. Tobias says it was his publisher’s idea, and he agreed in a weak moment. He notes that there are other good investment guides around (and many poor ones), but accurately adds: . . . reading three good investment guides instead of one will surely not triple, and probably not even improve, your investment results. So how does Mr. Tobias’s one-stop shopping site for investors hold up? Quite well. The author is a knowledgeable guide and a gifted writer. The book is a pleasure to read, which is important since so many people regard reading about investment options as an unpleasant if important chore. He covers most of the waterfront, and he is forthright in his opinions. For example, he doesn’t think much of investing in commodities or gold. On commodities, he writes: It is a fact that 90% or more of the people who play the commodities game get burned. I submit that you have now read all that you need ever read about commodities. On gold he offers, Gold itself pays no interest and costs money to insure. It is a hedge against inflation, all right, and a handy way to buy passage to Liechtenstein, or wherever it is we’re all supposed to flee to when the much ballyhooed collapse finally materializes. But if you’re looking for an inflation hedge, you might do better with stocks or real estate. Mr. Tobias is particularly strong in an area many people wouldn’t consider the province of an investment guide: frugality. Simply stated, spending less of your income is a great savings and investment strategy. Given effective tax rates, keeping an after-tax dollar in your pocket rather than in some merchant’s cash register is probably the equivalent of going out and earning two dollars before taxes. The author advises buying in bulk and hard bargaining on big purchases. He takes the reader through the pros and cons of most investment options in an engaging, common sense manner.

Every investor is different, of course. Mr. Tobias, for one, describes himself as rather chickenhearted. People should take on levels of risk that are not only appropriate for their income, goals, and stage of life, but also in line with their psychological ability to withstand risk. In other words, you want your investments to allow you to sleep at night.

Despite our differences, there are some psychological foibles most of us share when it comes to thinking about money. That’s the subject of a fascinating new book, Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes and How to Correct Them (Simon ∧ Schuster, $23, 0684844931) by Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich. The authors (Belsky is a journalist who wrote for Money magazine for seven years; Gilovich is a professor of psychology at Cornell University) take us into the world of psychoeconomic theory, which explains how widespread human behavior patterns have an adverse impact on our pocketbooks.

Take the concept of mental accounting, which deals with how we categorize money and treat it differently depending on its source. For example, we more easily fritter away money that was won at the racetrack the night before than we would rashly spend the contents of our hard-earned paychecks. Like other ideas of psychoeconomic theory, the various aspects of mental accounting are presented here through hypothetical scenarios in which readers can participate. This fun approach makes the issues at hand easy to identify with and clear. The bottom line solution to the mental accounting problem is this: Make sure you treat each dollar in your possession equally, no matter whence it came. This popularization of the work of psychologists hits on many interesting issues, including the fact that losses hurt more than gains please. That makes a lot of people more risk averse in their investment decisions than rational investigation would likely lead them to be. And then there’s the sobering fact that most of us are not as smart or as savvy as we imagine. The authors write: . . . for almost as long as psychologists have been exploring human nature, they have been amassing evidence that people tend to overestimate their own abilities, knowledge, and skills . . . in financial matters the tendency to place too much stock in what you know, or what you think you know, can cost you dearly. For most of these interesting tendencies, knowledge that they exist can help you fight them. The authors of this well-researched and clearly written book also offer specific remedies for the financial aspects of these psychological peccadilloes.

Psychology doesn’t abandon us once we put away the bills or monthly investment statements; it accompanies us to work (and everywhere else, for that matter). The ability to cooperate, collaborate, and even inspire our colleagues is a crucial factor in our own personal success as well as in the prosperity of our employer. In 1995, Daniel Goleman wrote a bestseller called Emotional Intelligence, which challenged the dominance of the IQ in measuring smarts. Now he’s taken those concepts to work in Working with Emotional Intelligence (Bantam, $25.95, 0553104624; Audio Renaissance, abridged, $16.95, 1559275154; unabridged, $39.95, 1559275162). Goleman received a doctorate from Harvard University and spent a dozen years covering behavioral and brain sciences for the New York Times. His essential message is an upbeat one: Those qualities that in an earlier time might have been labeled character or made one considered a good person are also the qualities that should help us get ahead at work.

There’s more good news. Your fate isn’t determined by some stagnant measure of your intelligence; you can improve on your emotional intelligence at any stage of life. In today’s work world, hierarchies have been flattened and the success of team work often depends on people’s ability to get along. Emotional intelligence has never been more important.

In readable detail, based on research and corporate profiles, Goleman lays out the personal competencies of emotional intelligence, which include self-awareness, self-regulation, and motivation, as well as social competencies, such as empathy and social skills. (Each category has more specific sub-categories.) This is an important and helpful book.

The changes in the American workplace in the past couple of decades haven’t all taken place within our heads. One seismic change has been the vastly expanded role of women in the work force, both in terms of number and influence. That change is the subject of Powerchicks: How Women Will Dominate America (Longstreet, $22, 1563525216) by Matt Towery. For a book about the growing strength of women in business, entertainment, and politics, as well as their dominant place as consumers and voters, the title strikes one as a tad irreverent. Mr. Towery, a former Georgia state legislator, says, however, that many influential women have willingly and proudly accepted the new term. As for why a man wrote this book, the author cites an old newspaper adage, to wit, You don’t have to die to be qualified to write obituaries. Mr. Towery has produced a glowing testament to women in a host of industries who have made it to the top or near top. Through numerous interviews, they tell of their motivations and of obstacles overcome. Among the many interesting points made are that corporate inflexibility might partly be behind the surge in female entrepreneurship and the description of a social phenomena he calls the female bachelor. This describes high-income, high-status single women with lots of disposable income who don’t feel pressured to marry.

Neal Lipschutz is managing editor of Dow Jones News Service.

Industries rise and fall, as do nations. Successful capitalism requires decline as well as creation. All this carries cost, as real people sometimes are lost in all the stopping and starting, the ending and renewal. But it seems that very dynamism and freedom to change is what allows economies to grow. Steel gives way to computer software, railroads take a back seat and Internet commerce is born. And so on.

Few, for instance, would have a couple of decades back imagined the significant role legal gambling now plays in our economy. The industry likes to talk about gaming, not gambling, and Las Vegas bills itself as a fun destination for the whole family. Come on, bring the kids along. And for a lot of people all of it’s true. Legalized gambling offers a distraction, entertainment, a night of excitement, whether it involves a trip to a casino, a bingo hall or even the exploration of the still-developing world of cyberspace gambling. But as New York Times reporter Timothy L. O’Brien ably demonstrates in his wide-ranging survey of a growth industry, gambling is still different. It depends upon and profits from the ineffable longing people have to change their lives in an instant, as if they were rubbing a magic lantern. Amid all the competing data and studies introduced by casino gambling’s critics and proponents is the fact that gambling can be an enormously destructive force in many communities and in many lives. O’Brien’s book, due in October, is Bad Bet: The Inside Story of the Glamour, Glitz and Danger of America’s Gambling Industry (Times Books, $25, 0812928075). The author starts with a description of gambling’s newest frontier: the Internet. The legality of U.S.-based gambling cyberspace sites hasn’t yet arrived, but there already are sites with offshore homes. Like much commerce in cyberspace, gambling is in its infancy, perhaps not even that far along. But consider the potential: relatively anonymous gambling without ever having to leave the glow of your personal computer. Until your credit card limit is hit, of course. If Internet gambling ever becomes widespread, it has huge implications for American society.

From there, Mr. O’Brien takes us on tours of Las Vegas, Atlantic City, the horse racetracks of Kentucky and Wall Street, among other venues. (It’s to the author’s credit that he acknowledges that some of the activity on what is generically called Wall Street namely, securities investing can bear a striking resemblance to gambling, regardless of socially acceptable defenses about capital formation for growing businesses.) Whatever the locale, Mr. O’Brien provides interesting historical context as well as present-day reality. His traditional reporting is interspersed with first-person life stories from some whose lives have been overtaken by gambling. After detailing the pluses and minuses of legal gambling in Atlantic City, once seen as a way to rejuvenate a depressed city, Mr. O’Brien concludes: But twenty years into its waltz with gambling, Atlantic City is still a dour, troubled town. He chronicles the rise of state-inspired gambling (lotteries) and details the decline of gambling at the racetrack, that erstwhile sport of kings. The problem with the track, in essence, is that things move too slowly. Today’s gamblers can find a lot more action at a slot machine. Mr. O’Brien has produced a well-researched and cleanly written guide to a big business that still leaves many Americans ambivalent. That may always be the case. The reporting is strong, but the book would have benefited from a bit more analysis and point of view based on the plethora of facts.

The growth of gambling is one example of our increasingly post-industrial economy. Sure, someone has to build slot machines and card tables, but gambling is at least a kindred spirit to that increasing number of economic sectors where no one actually produces anything. There’s been a ton of books published in the past few years about the increase of brain-powered jobs, the growing gaps in income and prestige between people who mainly use their heads at their jobs and those who mainly use their hands. If you take this trend to its logical conclusion, you have Joey Reiman’s new book, Thinking for a Living: Creating Ideas That Revitalize Your Business, Career and Life (Longstreet, $20, 1563524694). Mr. Reiman runs what he calls an ideation company, a group of thinkers who create advertising and marketing concepts. They eschew the actual execution of those ideas (ad placements, etc.), which is usually a big part of the job of traditional advertising agencies.

Reiman’s overriding point in this book is a good one, and a hopeful one, in this increasingly competitive economy: original thought still matters. Yes, things are digitized and computerized. Apparent advances in production or services are matched after an ever-smaller cycle of advantage, more and more businesses seem interchangeable, but ideas still can matter. Or as Mr. Reiman says in his always upbeat, inspirational style, Today currency is the idea, but tomorrow ideas will be the currency. Mr. Reiman tells his own story, interwoven with broad ideas and snippets from the unusual and progressive policies at his current company. He was a traditional advertising executive, now he’s the head of BrightHouse, the ideas company. No penny for your thoughts at this firm. A thorough ideation session from BrightHouse can cost a client $450,000, with some contracts exceeding $1 million for thinking, Mr. Reiman writes.

Even if you’re not going to start an ideas company, Mr. Reiman’s points are well taken. At a minimum, you’ve got to keep thinking about your own career in a work world where the options are plentiful and the guarantees are few. Which brings us to Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions (due in October from Harvard Business School Press, $22.50, 0875848575) by John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney and Howard Raiffa. Readers are taken step by step through methods of reaching good decisions on matters both business-related and personal. In a fast-changing world, a systematic approach to making decisions is essential.

This book would have been quite helpful to the people profiled in Disconnected: How Six People from AT&T Discovered the New Meaning of Work in a Downsized Corporate America by Barbara Rudolph. Ms. Rudolph takes an in-depth look at otherwise ordinary individuals who in the 1990s became casualties of the waves of downsizing at AT&T. These people had to live the mantras of the new economy, which for many of us are still only buzzwords: loyalty is dead; manage your own career; serial assignments; don’t invest too much emotional capital in your job.

All the subjects were quite open with Ms. Rudolph, who delves far beyond the business realities to seek the connection between the professional and the personal, the non-financial value of work to a person’s sense of worth. For so many years AT&T was a monolith, a unique American entity that more than most commercial concerns projected the illusion of permanence. After all, it was the phone company. Ms. Rudolph writes, The essential paternalism of the institution extended to both customers and employees. Join our family, and we will take care of you. In the end, most of Ms. Rudolph’s subjects did just fine. They forged successful post-AT&T lives, helped by a vibrant economy even in the face of the downsizing trend. Ms. Rudolph wisely doesn’t draw conclusions from her six. They are individuals, but even as each story is unique, they combine to provide a human face to the downsized waves who confronted the realities of our new economy.

While it is wise to realize that there is little guaranteed permanence in the work world, that you should always have a contingency plan, keep your skills up to date, and so on, these new trends are also a little sad. If we maintain a detachment on the job, a place where we spend so much of our lives, there becomes significantly less time and fewer places to express the positive ranges of our humanity.

Neal Lipschutz is managing editor of Dow Jones News Service.