The Raw Deal

Over the past twenty years, Americans have been fed a mash of confusing financial and economic information. Economist Ellen Frank's alternately enlightening and shocking volume shows us how what we've been taught to think about stocks, interest rates, personal opportunities, employment, government spending, inflation, and the like distorts popular understanding of how the economy really operates. But public confusion serves a distinct political goal: to camouflage the transformation of economic policy from a tool for improving the living standards of all to a tool for securing privileges for the wealthy.

Ellen Frank, senior economic analyst for the Poverty Institute at Rhode Island College, writes and lectures widely on U.S. and international economic policy