The Truth About Markets

Written by John Kay


By Julian Sudre

AN EXPLOSIVE content that takes the reader through an economical landscape with gripping perspectives at how capitalism and modern governments have turned around their economies according to social reforms and self-interested moral issues which in turn effect undeliberately market fundamentalism.

Written in an accessible way, Kay explores the American business model – ABM – which emphasizes freedom of contract, light regulations, low taxation, self-interest rules and the minimal state. But here Kay will make no bones about his objection of the ABM, that he regards as a naïve approach to human motivation and a simplistic analysis of structures of property rights.

The author – a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford – particularly ponders over behavioural impacts on market economies and countries such as Haiti or Nigeria, in which there is an insufficient basis of trust for market institutions to develop.
All along, to the layman in economics, the reader senses how economists interpret political events in the world including the talking heads on Bloomberg Television, the flower market of San Remo in Italy.
We are also taken to the used-car showroom and the corner shop and the control room of the National Grid.

His description of markets does effectively reinforce his witty and laconic style to dissect the core of the issue. Kay intelligently segmented the book into compact and pithy analysis and proves that his work goes beyond economic terms but answers with subtlety why some nations are rich and others poor.

The reader is offered a fresh vision of the way markets operate in the embedded human psychology of the world of today.