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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 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.
His most recent book was published in 2003 in Europe as The Truth about Markets and in 2004 in the US as Culture and Prosperity. He has published two collections of his columns, Everlasting Light Bulbs (2004) and The Hare & the Tortoise (2005). John commutes between London, Oxfordshire and the south of France, where he enjoys composing columns in the course of long walks in the mountains behind the Riviera.
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Teaching demands a warm heart and a cold eye
The desire to give people chances they may not deserve is admirable, it is just not the trait you want in examiners, says John Kay
Statistics, damned statistics and value added
The difficulty of measuring value added is the reason financial services are exempt from value added tax, writes John Kay
Accounting rules for public duty and private failure
The obligations of government are the product of future political expectations, not current legal duties, writes John Kay
Scotland’s sense of injustice blights its future
Why has Scotland’s growth rate not matched that of other small European states in the ‘arc of prosperity’, asks John Kay
Brown’s rules are a flawed basis for policy
The effect of the target is to focus attention on the target rather than its purpose. The target is met; the objective is not, writes John Kay
Fannie Mae and the limits of public obligation
The costs of the casual assumption of government obligation for private actions will continue to mount, writes John Kay
Forget the meltdown, worry about goo and asteroids
The best way of dealing with grave uncertainties, as with more banal disasters, is to buy options against them, writes John Kay
Metaphors in free fall: the anti-bubble named
Commendations go to several readers who, even if not coming up with the best word, identified key features of our current crisis, writes John Kay
Strange financial physics of the inverse bubble
Bubbles are puffed up, not puffed down. That is why we need a phrase to describe the anti-bubble, writes John Kay
There is a better way to stop bank failures
It seems absurd to design a monitoring or regulatory system on the premise of normality, but that is what we routinely do, writes John Kay
