of the CIA’s World Factbook and the 1997 edition of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Statistical Abstract of the United States . Yes, I know, the CIA is the espionage agency that had to read about India’s nuclear tests in The Washington Post. And now Pakistan is making mushroom clouds, too. Pretty soon every cabdriver and 7-Eleven manager in the world will have the bomb. And I also know that the Department of Commerce is no Plato’s Academy in Athens. But the baloney in the Factbook and the Statistical Abstract is presumably all cooked from the same ground-up scraps and innards, and comes packaged in easily compared slices. Although even our government doesn’t always agree with itself about these things. The FB says the estimated mid-1997 population of the United States is 267,954,764, while the SA says 267,645,000—a discrepancy of almost 310,000 people. That’s as if all the residents of Wichita, Kansas, had disappeared. Check the tornado reports. Call Dorothy. Anyway, when forced to chose between numbers, I’ve picked the CIA’s for the simple reason that nobody’s ever been terminated with extreme prejudice by the Department of Commerce. There is another problem with the statistics in this book. They’re outdated. All statistics are outdated. They are the record of a certain arbitrary moment, and by the time that record is processed and printed, it is, in effect, your senior-class picture in the high-school yearbook and you’re very embarrassed by last fall’s hairstyle. My statistics are even more outdated than usual, having been collected over a period of two and a half years. It would have been nice if I could have visited eight countries in one week, written about them over the weekend, published my work on Monday, and had an au courant book. But the thing could not be done. I went to Sweden, Cuba, and Russia in 1996. I went to Tanzania, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Wall Street in 1997. And my manuscript went to press in the spring of 1998. Things have changed in all those places. Economic conditions are somewhat better in Sweden, Albania, and Tanzania; worse in Russia and Shanghai. The pope has breezed through Cuba, to what effect I do not know. Hong Kong has suffered less at the hands of the mainland Chinese than I feared it would—so far. And what’s going to happen to the stock market remains the riddle it’s been since 1792, when twenty-four brokers gathered under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street and agreed to a set of rules by which they would sharp and cozen each other. I ask readers to take the numbers herein with the single grain of salt that the Romans believed to be an antidote to poison. The purpose of this book is to
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online