Niall Kishtainy is a professor of the history of economies at the London School of Economics. He has authored The Economics Book and Economics in Minutes. Niall has also worked as an advisor to the United Kingdom's government and the UN's Economic Commission for Africa.
Niall came to writing by a roundabout route. He started off in the British civil service, went on to work as a Middle East analyst and researcher, then as an economic adviser to development agencies in Ethiopia, Albania and the Palestinian Territories. He had an early go at writing when he was a journalist in Cairo in the late 1990s, covering everything from Egypt's ancient deserts to its shiny new banks.
He delved deeper into economics as a graduate student but gradually the hire-wire mathematics, and models so complex you need several degrees to understand them, he started to feel rather removed from the economic situations that people actually find themselves in. When the 2007 financial crisis struck, like many people he started to question whether pure economics had all the answers. He wondered how we'd got to where we were, and was drawn towards the links between history, economics and ideas about society more broadly.
Niall believe that the history of economic thinking and of real economic struggles can tell us a lot about our current situation and, it's in vivid writing that anyone can respond to where all this really comes to life. Most of all, he's interested in the stories we tell ourselves about our economic world, and why they matter. Niall wish he knew how to answer all the questions people ask him about why some economies get into such a mess, and why many of us seem to have lost faith in even the best of them — but in his writing he is constantly searching for stories that speak to these kinds of anxieties.
Another part of his work is as a teacher. He has given courses in economics and economic history at the London School of Economics and the University of Warwick. The latter where he earned his Ph.D. in Ecomics.