The Levelling

by Michael O'sullivan

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IN CHAPTER 11, I MENTIONED FINISHING THE LEVELLING WHILE ON HOLIDAY, and my first and greatest acknowledgment is to my family for their support through this project. I started to write The Levelling a couple of years ago in the remote reaches of Achill Island, County Mayo, and now finish it in slightly less remote, equally beautiful, and sunnier Corsica.

  I initially “finished” the book in April 2017—or, rather, I thought then that the book was finished. When I fired it off to a number of publishers, I was crestfallen to learn that many of them now require writers to submit scripts through literary agents. This was another hurdle to surmount, but I’m glad I persisted.

  I had the very good fortune to find Don Fehr. He politely told me what I had suspected, that the first version was incoherent, and over the course of a couple of months he helped me enormously in restructuring the book and making sense of my thoughts.

  Through Don, the book was picked up by PublicAffairs, which delighted me given their reputation for producing serious and thoughtful work. John Mahaney, an editor at PublicAffairs, has edited some of the key books I mention in this text, and I was tremendously excited to have the benefit of his experience and judgment. He has helped me to bring color to the book and strength to its arguments and to make it more real and relevant to readers across countries and political divides. The editing of Kathy Delfosse has greatly improved the book, and I appreciate her patience and eye for detail.

  Much of the work in this book is the product of years of writing, thinking, and researching. One person who has been instrumental as a collaborator is David Skilling, with whom I have written and researched extensively on the secret sauce behind the stability and strong economic performance of small advanced economies like Ireland, Switzerland, New Zealand, and Singapore. My friend Nicholas Benachi has also fed my mind through our discussions and exchanges on books and current affairs.

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  MICHAEL O’SULLIVAN grew up in Ireland, where he studied economics and finance in Cork before earning MPhil and DPhil degrees in international finance as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. He then continued life teaching in the Department of Economics at Princeton University and later moved back to Europe as an investment strategist at UBS. He has worked as chief investment officer in the wealth management division of a major bank, where he uses the tough discipline of market forces to assess what is happening in the world in real time. (All views and opinions expressed in the book are his own and do not in any way reflect the views or position of any investment firm.)

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