Dominic Lawson thereby allowed me to get my anti-British feelings about the Hong Kong handover off my chest in a way that would offend the largest number of British people. Sorry. I’m over it. I now realize that if I’d owned Hong Kong, I would have given it back to the Chinese, too. Although not until they bought me some drinks. But I’m Irish. This book could not have been finished—or, at least, published—if I hadn’t gotten fabulous and fabulously necessary editorial help from Andrew Ferguson, senior editor at The Weekly Standard, and gotten good advice and hand-holding from Denise Ferguson. Whatever shape and structure the book has is due to Andy. The flabby and pointless parts are (as in my person, so in my work) mine. The manuscript was then vetted by Nicholas Eberstadt, visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and visiting fellow at Harvard’s Center for Population Studies, and by Mary Eberstadt, writer for The Weekly Standard and other fine journals. Nick did his best to make the logic of my economic arguments actually logical and tried to show me how to use statistics in an unstupid manner. Mary helped put flesh and (more’s the pity) blood into the descriptions of the damage that totalitarianism does to people, and she tactfully pointed out a number of not-unstupid solecisms. The magazine pieces that formed the raw material of this book were assigned and, in many cases, conceived by Rolling Stone Managing Editor Robert Love. His editorial craftsmanship was great, and his patience was extreme. Bob has a knowledge of journalistic storytelling, something that has always eluded me. Specifically he knows what part of a story is the beginning, what part is the middle, and what part is the end—no small matter to the reader. Also a blessing was the help I received on Chapter II from an old friend, Men’s Journal editor Terry McDonell, the person who hired me at Rolling Stone in the first place. Terry and Men’s Journal senior editor David Willey helped me to explain high finance without exposing myself as the person who, in 1997, bought precious metals, held on to Japanese yen, and sold Pfizer short. An enormous amount of unsung research-and-development grunt work was done by Tobias Perse. And more of the same was accomplished by Mike Guy and Rodd McLeod. Exhaustive—and exhausting—fact checking was done by Mary Christ, Sarah Pratt, Kim Ahearn, Erika Fortgang, and Gina Zucker. Any remaining errors of fact are the result of my own pigheaded persistence in error. Heroic copy-editing tasks (I cannot spell well enough to find the SPELL CHECK icon) were undertaken by Eric Page, Marian Berelowitz, Corey Sabourin, and
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