Throughout her work, Mazzucato has argued that decades of antigovernment rhetoric, warped economic value accounting, and disinvestment from and outsourcing of government work have sapped the ability of governments in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere to perform their essential social and economic functions.Ĭharacteristically fluid, in places breezy, Mazzucato supports her claims with a torrent of examples and quotations drawn from diverse sectors of industry, finance, government action, and economic and historical scholarship. Government has immense economic influence, she writes, and must use it to create, shape, and lead markets that serve public purposes. In her latest book, Mission Economy, Mazzucato argues that revitalized and activist government is necessary to reform capitalism and solve today’s most pressing problems. These functions include not merely fixing “market failures,” such as underinvestment in fundamental science, but actively investing in value-creating public goods such as education, infrastructure, health care, and pathbreaking technological innovation. Throughout her work, Mazzucato has argued that decades of antigovernment rhetoric, warped economic value accounting, and disinvestment from and outsourcing of government work have sapped the ability of governments in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere to perform their essential social and economic functions.

Profit-based value-accounting systems such as the current version of gross domestic product conceal government’s role in value creation, ignore the importance of unpaid care work, and contribute to financialization and short-termism in business, producing problems such as the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007. She showed how this accounting of value rewards business activities that extract and destroy real-world value while undervaluing drivers of long-term and inclusive growth. In The Value of Everything (2018), Mazzucato took on one of the fundamental tenets of neoclassical economics: that market price is a good proxy for social value. Mazzucato argued that there is no substitute for visionary, mission-oriented government investment in creating pathbreaking new technologies and markets. In her book The Entrepreneurial State (2013), which focused on the United States, she compellingly illustrated the central role of federal government research and development investment, early-adopter procurement, and infrastructure construction in creating today’s fastest-growing industries. The economist Mariana Mazzucato may be the most eloquent contemporary exponent of the importance of dynamic, activist government for healthy capitalist economies.

Moonshot mariana mazzucato