Thanks to Alison Shaw at The Policy Press for persevering with the idea of an edited collection and helping to ensure it was not too large a collection. Laura Vickers at Policy put in hours way beyond what was agreed in chasing up copyright clearances for reprinting all these papers and especially to help secure permission to include the images used throughout the book including many not used in the original publications. Jo Morton and Laura Greaves edited the text and ensured that the work from so many sources was tidied up, allowing it to be reproduced throughout this whole book to a similar quality. Dave Worth typeset all the text and illustrations. The images shown here are from the collections of iStockphoto and Super-Stock images.
Vassiliki (Vicky) Yiagopoulou, was very kind in searching out the images used at the start of each section and chapter. Paul Coles redrew all the graphs, tables and maps shown here without ever asking when the apparently limitless stream of requests would end (although he did raise an eyebrow at times!). Bronwen Dorling read an early draft and convinced me not to be as mean to the world’s elite economists in print as I was in that first draft (what you are just about to read is me being kind to them). David Dorling did the same and suggested which parts of my previously published papers were so boring that you should be spared reading them and thus helped in the extracting of sections. Finally, although they are not always reproduced below to save on space and your time, many of the papers reprinted here had their own acknowledgment sections to anonymous referees, journal editors, to colleagues who had helped me earlier with work and so on and on. It is quite shocking to step back and list everyone you owe favours to. I am very grateful for all the help.
For any human creation – from a humble book to a complicated television, to generating fair play in a school playground – many of us might think we know how it works, but a single person could hardly ever put a good book together from beginning to end, let alone make a television on their own, or bring up and organise many schools classes of children so they play well in the open air. Books, like machines, like playgrounds, like villages, towns, cities, countries and international organisations reveal what it is that human beings are really good at – working together. We are just very bad at acknowledging that. Especially in our more selfish and individualistic of cultures. To say “when I wrote my book” is to help prolong the myths that we can do much at all on our own. We are almost all of us guilty at various times of suggesting that we contribute a great deal more than our fair share, and guilty of complaining about the apparent deficiencies of others. Almost everyone who does contribute more than their fair share will never get to read a book like this. So, we need to start learning better how to play fair.