Simplicity has a price
Most popular non-fiction titles are aimed at an educated audience. But a reading age level test indicates that a 10-year-old could easily understand the world's best selling business book.
An era of big names
Some CEOs command celebrity status in the business world. But their companies' performances show fame doesn't always equal fortune.
Anti-capitalism books: May 2002
John surveys the latest wave of books attacking capitalism.
Citizen Keynes
Looking for a lesson in economic behaviour? Put down your textbooks, and head off to the cinema or video store.
Thinking in sevens
Categories and lists help us to make better sense of a complex world. But they must be chosen carefully.
On John Kay’s Bookshelf – Archive page
Books that John has reviewed in the past...
Peak performance
The idea of rational profit- and utility maximisation is prominent in economics, but was challenged by Herbert Simon, a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics who died in February. Instead Simon emphasised the idea of bounded rationality in economics. This article explains why that approach deserves to survive its author.
Relativism rules
Seemingly conflicting theories about economics and business may in fact just illustrate different aspects of an issue. It is often pointless to look for a single explanation of a successful business operation or economic behaviour in general. The post-modernist idea that scientific truths are not objective facts captures something very important about the nature of social science
Waldfogel’s unwanted gift
Can conventional economic theory be extended to understanding Christmas gifts? Maybe it can, but this would require a more subtle understanding of human behavour than the idea of rational economic man. This article shows that we do not simply value gifts in terms of the cost of the purchase.