A . M . , AND 5 A . M . feedings while I . . . stared out my office window and picked adverbs. Thank you for not killing me, dear. A Note About the Bibliography There isn’t one. I’m too lazy. And who ever heard of humor with footnotes? ****** But there are certain books which I found crucial to a neophyte student of economics, especially if (and I mean no insult to the texts by this) that student is uninformed, innumerate, light-minded, and a big goof-off. In other words, these are the books to read if you want to know something about economics but have never gotten further into the subject than figuring out a trifecta at Belmont: Free to Choose and Capitalism and Freedom by Milton and Rose Friedman New Ideas from Dead Economists by Todd G. Buchholz The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayeck Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt The Tyranny of Numbers by Nicholas Eberstadt How the West Grew Rich by Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell Jr. The Armchair Economist by Steven E. Landsburg There are also certain books you should avoid, such as anything with the words Investment and Success in the title and everything ever written by John Kenneth Galbraith. A Note About the Numbers in this Book How accurate are the statistics in the preceding pages? How long is a piece of string? All statistics are fraught with error. And I, personally, cannot add a 15 percent tip to a ten-dollar bar tab and get the same number twice. Not that I’ve ever had a bar tab as small as ten dollars. And that may be part of the problem. But, even sober, I’m no mathematician. And neither, apparently, are the other people who publish statistics. For example, I refer the reader to the debates about Cuban gross domestic product in Chapter V and Tanzanian per-capita GDP in Chapter VIII. The numbers seem as random and inadequate as the change I ended up leaving that surly bartender. Statistics, however, can have some value for comparative purposes, and this is the way I’ve tried to use them. Unless otherwise noted, the population, GDP, vital stats, and other principal figures in Eat the Rich come from the 1997 edition The History of Money by Jack Weatherford Money, A History edited by Jonathan Williams
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