He compares greedy boardroom fat cats to corrupt African dictators. He thinks anti-globalisation protesters are naive and wrong. He takes sideswipes at his old Oxford University colleagues and believes British Prime Minister Tony Blair could be the best thing for the centre-left since Franklin D Roosevelt.
John Kay sounds like the archetypal polemicist, an economist with attitude. Wrong on all counts. Kay argues that John Maynard Keynes was right when he wanted economists to be treated like dentists. They should use their skills to remedy specific problems rather than launch ideological crusades. Grand narratives are out. Gentle probing is in.
Kay has the appearance of a man who would look convincing in a white coat rather than a sober two-piece suit, and who could swap words and numbers for high-speed drills and amalgam. His new book, The Truth About Markets (published by Penguin), however, is intended to show that books about economics do not have to be so abstruse that reading them is like having teeth pulled. As with the vogue for books popularising science, the idea is accessibility: Adam Smith gets a mention but so does Madonna; Milton Friedman rubs along with Winnie the Pooh.
”I’m coming at this without attitude,” Kay says in his London town house. ”There are two key truths. Market economies are the most successful economic system that we have had. But the notion that this is the result of encouraging people to be greedy is a travesty.”
As such, he is a strong critic of the American business model of unfettered capitalism, which he says bears little relation to economic reality in the world’s biggest economy. Nor is he convinced that the United States has all the answers. ”My cheese-eating, surrender monkey fact of the moment is that the difference in productivity per person between France and the US is down to the fact that the French have lunch and five weeks’ holiday.”
Kay says he wanted to write a book about economics that was for the intelligent layman. ”I also had a growing feeling throughout the 1990s that what had been presented since the end of the Cold War was an incredibly crass and simplified account of how markets work. It succeeded in being both very unattractive and untrue. In 1999 it reached an extreme pitch with the dotcom boom.
”I said to my publishers that what we needed to make this book work is a Wall Street crash. I told them that I didn’t know when it was coming but that it would come before the book was on the shelves.” More than a decade after the Berlin Wall came down and three years into the bear market in equities, he thinks the timing is right for his assessment of what’s right and what’s wrong with markets. Capitalism, he says, is a complex web of institutions and all large-scale attempts to interfere with the market mechanism — be they the central planning of the Soviet Union or the neo-liberal reforms in New Zealand in the 1980s — are doomed.
What this means is that policy-makers should show some humility, recognising that they don’t know all the answers. ”Franklin Roosevelt was about as good as it gets for the centre-left, because he was happy to experiment, but equally happy to pull the plug if the results were bad.”
Kay calls this ”disciplined pluralism”, adding that traditionally social democrats in Britain have found it hard to make modest, reversible changes, preferring instead the big bang solutions that led to comprehensive education and high-rise flats. Blair, he thinks, is in the FDR mould.
”Roosevelt came to it without any ideological preconceptions. Something of that is true of Blair, and if you start with my philosophy you find that quite attractive.”
Born and educated in Scotland, Kay still has a trace of his Edinburgh burr. He taught at Oxford University, England, in the 1970s, before helping forge the reputation of the newly founded Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) as the oracle on tax and spending issues.
During the next decade from 1986 to 1996 his time was divided between the London Business School and London Economics, a private consultancy venture. He returned to Oxford to become the director of the Said Business School, a move he now regrets. ”If the IFS was a good time, then that was a bad time,” he says of the two years spent at the Said. He identifies the root cause of his unhappiness as the ”impossibility of getting decisions made within Oxford. It’s an institution that has no decision-making process at all. I walked out after two-and-a-half years. It was fairly acrimonious in that academic style where people are politely pleasant to each other.”
Since quitting Oxford and selling his stake in London Economics in 1999, Kay has become a low-key media don, writing for the Financial Times in London, keeping his hand in with a bit of academic work and putting together the ideas for his book.
So what, precisely, does disciplined pluralism mean? ”It’s small-scale experimentation with rapid feedback. So if it works, it’s imitated and if it doesn’t, it’s cut off.”
So what then does he think of the anti-globalisation protesters? ”I think they are mainly naive,” he replies. ”There is an incoherence about them. It is fairly clear what Naomi Klein and Noreena Hertz are against.
”It’s not very clear what they are for, apart from wishing the world was a nicer place, in a general way. That’s the post-socialist left. But it is bound to create sympathy for people of that kind if capitalism or people advocating the market economy continue to portray such an unattractive picture of it. What supporters of capitalism should be doing is telling the truth, which is that capitalism does not depend on unrestrained greed.”
But unrestrained greed is precisely what he sees as all too prevalent in boardrooms. When a CEO extracts several hundred thousand dollars from a company, he argues, it is not materially different from former president Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire siphoning off foreign aid into his bank accounts in Europe.
There is no real market for executive pay, he asserts, adding that he believes it is wrong to say rewards at the top are simply the result of demand and supply. ”We ought to think of these as positions of trust and authority, like judges or the prime minister. We keep greedy people out of politics, but then we say it is all right for them to be in business. Who should be surprised that we end up with corrupt business people?”
Given his strongly held middle-way beliefs, Kay finds it surprising that he has not been asked to do political work. ”I think that in part it’s a misconception about what economics is about. Most people think it’s about macroeconomics, the sort of stuff you read in the market reports in newspapers. If you say you are an economist people ask whether there’s a recession or will interest rates go up. If you say you are not that kind of economist, they look puzzled.”
He is, he says, both an optimist and a pessimist. ”You can be optimistic that you have set in place processes in Western Europe that seem designed to make life better, and not much could be done to stop them.” The flip side, however, is that it will take time — a very long time — for countries in the rest of the world to become as rich. ”It is not true that we can do anything we want just so long as we want it enough. In any case, the mechanism that gives us non-corrupt governments in rich countries is incredibly fragile.” — Â