The Truth about Markets examines the big questions of economics - why some countries and peoples are rich, and others poor; why businesses succeed and fail; the scope of markets and their limits. Witty yet profound, immersed in the most recent economic thinking yet completely accessible, it is both a tract for our times and a text for a new political economy. We live, now more than ever before, in a world made of markets. How do they work? Why do they work? Why are they better than alternative systems of organizing economics? And why, sometimes, do they fail so catastrophically? This accessible book explains the big questions of contemporary economics. John Kay uses storytelling to show that markets cannot be detached from the societies in which they are based.