Living Bibliography

The Truth About Markets: Their genius, their limits, their follies

John Kay

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 responds to a review of his work:

“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.”