Mission Economy

What I find most encouraging in this book is the firm conviction that when we work together, amazing things are possible. The author calls it Cathedral thinking. At the time the cathedrals were built, although they had many fewer resources than we have and lived in a far more primitive way, they were prepared to put down the foundations for these huge stone buildings without having a programme, a cost plan or even knowing that it would stand up. This requires leadership, long-term thinking, patience and commitment. She links this with Greta Thunberg's superb speech to the EU parliament days after the Notre Dame fire. (https://youtu.be/BzgOaFsphjU) The main new element in the context of moonshot projects is that new projects have to be bottom up as well as top down; so leadership and ability to listen and participate are essential. Aside from this, the book spells out the nuts and bolts needed to develop public-private projects at scale.

Although Mazzucato was once described by Bloomberg as a Marxist, Mazzucato is very far from that, and what she is most interested in is "how to govern the relationships between the public and the private sectors and how to structure rules, relationships and investments so that all people can flourish and planetary boundaries are respected". Those people who think that everything can be governed by self-regulating markets, like a gigantic machine are simply wrong. 'Markets need to be embedded in culture, not culture in markets' to quote Karl Polanyi.

As always with any writings which touch on the economics sphere, Mazzucato begins with an account of current bad theory and bad practice. Many readers will join with me in a concern about inequality of race, gender and wealth; exploitation of the planet, excessive greed, pollution, species extinction and all the other ills we are all too aware of. The sense is, though, that these ills have come about due to faulty thinking, faulty attitudes and faulty assumptions. Faulty thinking not just by a few individuals, but throughout our Government, academia, business, finance and – yes you have to admit it – among ourselves. We are all economists.

As the author puts it, the wrong question is: how much money is there and what can we do with it? This is the common mind set. The right question is: what needs doing and how can we structure budgets to meet these goals?

She goes on to spread out the lessons from the Apollo moonshot programme.

In thinking about the key attributes of the Apollo programme, six stand out: ( 1 ) vision infused with a strong sense of purpose; ( 2 ) risk - taking and innovation; ( 3 ) organisational dynamism; ( 4 ) collaboration and spillovers across multiple sectors; (5) long - term horizons and budgeting that focused on outcomes; and ( 6 ) a dynamic partnership between the public and private sectors.

Of course, the Apollo programme was driven by cold war competition with the USSR, without which it would never have happened, but the thrust of the book is to look at how these lessons can be applied to the grand challenges of today; the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals. Usually, this type of flexibility and concentrated purpose only arises in wartime conditions, when military organisations are given autonomy from Government bureaucracy. So the question is how current industrial strategy and linear production models can be reformed to enable collaborative, purposeful action at scale?

Here the question of the interplay of competition and co-operation is important. Public discourses around free markets are based entirely on competition; the survival of the fittest, creative destruction and so on. I am reminded here that Darwin published, among others, [two] seminal books: "On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection . . . in the struggle for life", which is mostly about natural selection by competition, and "The Descent of Man, and selection in relation to sex" which takes a different and much neglected approach of selection by female preference. Naturally enough, Mariano Mazzucato would prefer the latter which includes the emotional intelligence of the feminine - a preference for harmony and beauty.

Part 4 of the book contains the meat of how capitalism needs to be reformed through encouraging the collective creation of value by partnerships. Also spreading a notion of money which recognises that it is created as a tool to oil the wheels of production and trade, not as a tyrant. The misuse of 'economic rent' (land rents, monopoly rents etc.) as a means to extract value from the overall economy is rightly condemned, although rent seeking is so ingrained in the thinking of financial professionals that one might despair of change in this sphere. The author calls out the way that laws around patents, (intellectual property) have been co-opted by the interests of large corporations so that the original purpose of patents, the encouragement of invention, has been subverted and they now act to restrict innovation instead. Knowledge needs to flow.

Most important, in Mariana Mazzucato's view, more attention has to be paid to relationships. Her 'mission' approach always starts by finding and listening to key people and questioning how the relationships between actors can be made to work better and how their capabilities can be used. There is real experience behind these assertions. She has established a team at University College London called the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. It appears that in several parts of the globe they are succeeding in bringing about change, in redesigning institutions and disturbing the composure of the neoliberal economics profession, who are so set on scarcity.

In her concluding pages, she pays tribute to the women scholars who put life at the centre of the economy, not the economy at the centre of life. Hannah Arendt's work on the public life, Elinor Ostrom on creating community via the 'commons', Kate Raworth and Ellen MacArthur on the circular economy, Stephanie Kelton on Monetary Theory and Carlota Perez on the possibility of a golden age.

Is it that the power of the feminine, emotional intelligence, will save the world? I hope so.