John Kay

Even if economic issues are more central to politics than ever before, argument today is less about the nature of economic systems than about the relative abilities of different politicians to administer a system on whose basic structure all are in agreement.

Tailgaters think the view that their behaviour is dumb is based on a purely theoretical analysis, which is refuted by the tailgater’s practical experience. And so the culture of self-confident, self-congratulatory tailgaters perpetuates itself.

Processes matter to us as well as outcomes, and so we genuinely appreciate gifts even if we don’t really care for the item.

British governments will need to make tough choices about taxes and public spending in the decade ahead. These choices are inevitably political. But they can only be well made if the information on which these choices are based is not.

A stance which is pro-business must be distinguished from a stance which is pro-market. In the two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, that distinction has not been appreciated well enough.

Bookreview: Uncommon Sense: economic insights, from marriage to terrorism by Gary Becker and Richard Posner

Markets are not a well-oiled machine: they are a constantly changing, adaptive biological system.

When the next crisis hits, and it will, the frustrated public is likely to turn, not just on politicians who have been negligently lavish with public funds, or on bankers, but on the market system. What is at stake now may not just be the future of finance, but the future of capitalism.

Markets are not a well oiled physical machine: they are a constantly changing, adaptive biological system.

Economics is not so much the queen of the social sciences but the servant, and needs to base itself on anthropology, psychology – and the sociology of ideologies.