The Truth About Markets: Their Genius, Their Limits, Their Follies [Hardcover]

'one of the leading British economists of his generation'

'an ambitious and brilliantly executed book...It is accessible and witty, and it sheds light on the way the world works'

'written with wit and subtlety...an important contribution to the post-1990s reassessment of capitalism'

'[an] important new book...Kay makes an awful lot of sense about the limits of modern government'

We live, now more than ever before, in a world made of markets. How do they work? Why do they work? Why are they better than alternative systems of organizing economics? And why, sometimes, do they fail so catastrophically? This accessible book explains the big questions of contemporary economics. John Kay uses storytelling to show that markets cannot be detached from the societies in which they are based.

It is bad form in Britain for an author to comment on a review but the Kirkus review is seriously misleading. The reviewer says that 'John Kay has produced a spirited, informative and very readable justification for the American Business Model'. Flattering, in a way, but not true. The chapter on the American Business Model concludes that 'The ABM is deficient for its naive approach to issues of human motivation, its simplistic analysis of structures of property rights, its inability to maintain efficiency in the face of imperfect information, its misleading account of markets in risk, its glossing over of problems of cooperation and coordination, and its failure to describe the generation of the new knowledge on which its very success depends.
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

John Kay is one of Britain's leading economists. He was the first (controversial) head of the Oxford Said Business School, and for many years headed Europe's largest private firm providing economic advice to companies and governments. The ECONOMIST says "Kay is well on the way to turning himself into the European Michael Porter". He has also been described as "the best management theorist in Britain". He has a regular column in the FINANCIAL TIMES.