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John Kay has been writing a column on economics and business since 1995. His academic career has included chairs at London Business School and Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is currently a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. He also had a career in the policy world which established the Institute for Fiscal Studies as one of the most respected think tanks, and a business career in which he established, developed and sold a substantial consulting firm and in which he has been a non-executive director of Halifax plc and several companies.
John has published many books, including Foundations of Corporate Success (1993), The Truth about Markets (2003) and most recently The Long and the Short of It: finance and investment for normally intelligent people who are not in the industry. His new book, Obliquity, will be published by Profile Books in March 2010.
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Labour’s digital plan gets in the way of real progress
The Digital Britain report is the latest project driven by technological possibility rather than economic need or social value, writes John Kay
How the market proved no panacea for BT
The verdict must be that privatisation provided a route for the managed decline of a business whose historic purpose was disappearing, writes John Kay
Powerful interests are trying to control the market
‘Rent-seeking’ is found whenever economic power is concentrated – in the state, in large private business, in groups of co-operating and colluding firms. America has a new generation of rent-seekers: investment bankers and corporate executives, writes John Kay
Uncommon Sense
This compilation of essays from the blog of Gary Becker and Richard Posner covers a range of topical issues including gay marriage, terrorism and traffic congestion, says John Kay
Chaotic evolution defines the market economy
Markets are not a well-oiled machine: they are a constantly changing, adaptive biological systemn, writes John Kay
‘Too big to fail’ is too dumb an idea to keep
While regulators may be at fault in not having acted sufficiently vigorously, to say they caused the crisis is as ludicrous as saying that crime is caused by the indolence of the police, writes John Kay
True survivors do not clutch at straws
We are all inclined to believe we have more influence over events than we do. The answer is to maintain a sense of our long-term objectives while acknowledging the limits to our freedom, writes John Kay
How the skies proved the limits of regulation
The experience of the airline industry illustrates the phenomenon of regulatory capture – the tendency for regulators to see through the eyes of the industry they regulate, writes John Kay
Markets after the age of efficiency
If markets are informationally efficient, why is there so much trade between people who take different views of the same future? If the theory were true, the activities it purports to explain would barely exist, writes John Kay
Evolution is the real hidden hand in business
Large and complex corporations, like biological organisms, could only be the product of incremental change and adaptation. Their common essential characteristic is inexact replication, writes John Kay
