As an author, I have the good fortune to possess friends who are willing to tell me that my thoughts have not yet adequately cohered or that my manuscript is not yet a book. Indeed, for better or worse, I have four such friends: Paul Lyons, Mike Burke, Louis Ferleger, and Jon Mandle. All discussed the ideas in this study with me and read earlier versions of this book. All, at one time or another, made it clear to me that I had not yet accomplished what I had set out to do. For that I thank them.

My idea was to bring together two sets of issues: the problems caused by economic globalization and technological change, on the one hand, and those associated with the way we fund political campaigns, on the other hand. I wished to argue that there was a need to change the latter in order to solve the former. I wanted to reject neither the economic growth associated with market economies nor the goal of distributing the benefits of economic modernization fairly.

The dislocations caused by economic progress are real and substantial. But I believe that alleviating these problems does not require rejecting global market integration and technological change, much less a market-based economy. Rather, my hypothesis is that achieving a more egalitarian political process is the key to greater economic justice.