One morning I awoke to find that I had changed. Although I had not grown a shell and turned into a beetle, as in Kafka's story, I had experienced a fundamental metamorphosis in my views of economics and my role as an economist. I could no longer fathom why I had followed my fellow economists in making my writing accessible to so few. I realized that economics had taken root because the writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo could be read by any educated person, including policy makers. So I decided then and there to write more general-interest pieces and to communicate more widely. If I succeeded, then maybe even my brothers and sisters would finally understand what I study and do. I began this task with Global Challenges: An Approach to Environmental, Political, and Economic Problems, which showed how basic game theory could enlighten us on a host of exigencies confronting humankind. This book opened doors previously shut to me, thus reinforcing my revelation that being understood by people in international organizations, students in universities, and others among the general population had its rewards. But Global Challenges was only a halfway house, because many of the game concepts remained abstruse.

The success of Global Challenges emboldened me to go further with my venture. Thus, I coauthored The Political Economy of NATO with Keith Hartley. This book was written for an interdisciplinary audience that included political scientists.