The character of an educational system can most readily be understood by discovering who controls it. In 1979, the answer was reasonably clear. To use today's fashionable term, there were five main educational stakeholders: local authorities, teachers' unions, colleges of education, examination boards and the central government. Of these, the most import-ant were the local … Continue reading Essay: First steps in making schools independent

India's Economic Reforms 1991-2001 By Vijay Joshi and I. M. D. Little 282pp. Oxford: Clarendon Press £25 The decade of the 1980s was a historical watershed. The twentieth century has been dominated by collectivism - the planning and control of economic life by governments. In the 1980s, collectivism collapsed, both as a project and as … Continue reading Book Review: The road of excess leads to wisdom

The Good Society By John Kenneth Galbraith Sinclair-Stevenson. £12.99 It is hard to be critical of someone who writes as wittily and pithily as John Kenneth Galbraith. But any temptation to undue leniency on this score should be resisted. An economist's track record is more important than his style, and Galbraith's is not good. Twenty … Continue reading Book Review: Whatever happened to the New Industrial State?

Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty By Andrew Gamble Oxford: Polity. £45 Friedrich von Hayek's career is a story of death and resurrection. He was born in Vienna in 1899 and died in Freiburg in 1992, the most famous survivor of the once famous Austrian school of economics. For much of his life he fought … Continue reading Book Review: After serfdom

A Soaring Eagle, Alfred Marshall, 1842 - 1924 by Peter Groenewegen Cheltenham: Elgar. £59.95 This is the first full-length biography of Alfred Marshall, founder of the Cambridge School of Economics, and the dominant force in British economics from the death of Mill to the rise of Keynes. Hitherto we have had to make do with … Continue reading Book Review: The sage who was reluctant to publish