Mariana Mazzucato – updates below – deutsch hier
Mariana Mazzucato’s “Mission Economy” spells out her vision for “The “Enterpreneurial State”, title of her first bestseller. It made her famous for debunking some of the popular myths about the market as the only innovative generator of value.
Now she has written a “Moonshot Guide” on how the re-imagined state could become a key player in the post Covid transformation everyone is chatting about. Two reviews illustrate why chatter is all we are likely to get from the mainstream:
“Arresting as Ms Mazzucato’s views on economic development are, her book does not really offer a route back to that purpose and cohesion. But that is what America needs most. Sadly, those goals look as remote and inaccessible as the Moon.” (read The Economist review here or scroll down)
Stately purpose and cohesion? John Kay seems to smell the bloated Keynesian State. Though a great debunker of market myths himself, Kay seems to dislike Mazzucato’s style. Too reminiscent of the optimistic white board wielding American Business Model, perhaps? Maybe that explains his stale review. (read the FT/John Kay review here or scroll down)
Both reviews of “Mission Economy” are of the more or less sympathetic mainstream type: Mazzucato’s analysis maybe excellent but her solutions are fanciful “moonshine”. Neither displays much interest in the digitally enabled re-invention of the state and the commons , or de-centralised, let alone democratised, resource allocation.
Rather they come across as TINA-waving attorneys of “the powerful economics establishment that has continued to espouse market fundamentalism despite its repeated failure …” as Carlota Perez puts it in Bob Simison’s IMF article:
” ‘Mazzucato’s principal contributions have been to challenge thinking about the role of government, highlight the disconnect between value and price, and reconnect theory and policy practice through her work with governments’, says Carlota Perez … ‘She is a very brave woman to confront the powerful economics establishment that has continued to espouse market fundamentalism despite its repeated failure to identify bubbles, predict crashes, and to give advice for truly successful policies’, Perez says. …
For her own part, Mazzucato sees her work as far from finished. This time around, there’s been little discussion so far of government budget cutting as a cure for the world’s pandemic-stricken economies. But she sounds a warning. “Be careful,” she says. Even as governments open the fiscal spigots to counter the pandemic’s downward pressures, “don’t assume that means that we won’t have austerity.” Already there’s talk in Britain of “burden sharing,” meaning that local governments may be expected to repay funds advanced by the central government, she says. “That would mean cuts in the very services and systems and structures which we seem to have woken up to during the pandemic, calling them ‘essential,’” Mazzucato says. “There’s a huge battle ahead.” read the whole article at IMF.org or download PDF here
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Mission Economy 2021 – articles, interviews, reviews videos
weforum.org 1-2022 Mariana Mazzucato on rethinking the state to improve partnerships – Davos interivew
youtube 2-2021 Mariana Mazzucato talks to Gillian Tett of the Financial Times at a moment of great challenges and opportunity for the world
goodreads – mitpress.mit.edu 10-2021 Public Purpose : Industrial Policy’s Comeback and Government’s Role in Shared Prosperity – by Mariana Mazzucato
How governments can spur growth and innovation to solve their greatest challenges—from green energy to national security to building resilient health systems.
Known around the world for challenging mainstream economics, economist Mariana Mazzucato believes, as the Financial Times writes, that “the public sector can and should be a cocreator of wealth that actively steers growth to meet its goals.” In Public Purppse, she calls on governments to create the economies we need today.
Mazzucato’s challenge leads off a debate on the revival of industrial policy—roughly defined as deliberate government action to re(shape) the economy. Industrial policy has fallen out of favor in recent decades as economists defer to free markets to produce innovation and growth. Yet today, thinkers across the political spectrum have begun expressing new interest in industrial policy as a way to address the most serious problems of our times: from national security and climate change, to the market’s underfunding of public goods, to sluggish economic growth and labor market dysfunction.
Public Purpose makes a compelling case for industrial policy—what it is, and why we need it now. Addressing investment, innovation, supply chains, and growth, it provides a robust vision of a renewed industrial policy, and what it can offer the US economy in the face of climate change and a global pandemic.
ideaspace.substack.com 3-2021 Professor Mariana Mazzucato on how to create value – interview with Yancey Strickler
lse.ac.uk/events facebook 1-2021 public lecture at the LSE Mission Economy: a moonshot guide to changing capitalism – by Mariana Mazzucato
M MAZZUCATO about her new book “Mission Economy” in the FT Covid exposes capitalism’s flaws The pandemic is an opportunity for policymakers to fix the structure of the economic system
If there is an economic lesson from the past 12 months, it is this: Covid-19 is the moment to do capitalism differently. The pandemic showed our economic system is not simply in crisis, it is structurally flawed.
Gig economy jobs are not protecting workers in hard times. Rising inequality means people turn to loans to make ends meet, lifting the ratio of private debt to disposable income. For all the talk of stakeholder capitalism, businesses still prioritise distributing short-term gains to shareholders. State capacity is hollowed out and outsourced to consulting companies. All the while, future crises like climate change have been made worse — indeed, 53 per cent of the Covid-19 recovery funding allocated to energy companies by G20 governments has been handed to fossil fuel projects, equivalent to around $151bn.
If we are to build back better in the coming year, we need to design policy in terms not of levelling but tilting the playing field — in the direction of equitable, green and sustainable growth that favours all stakeholders and solves our greatest societal challenges. Fortunately, for the first time in a generation, government has the upper hand. Here is a six-point plan on how policymakers can seize the moment.
First, as trillions of dollars are being injected into the economy for the purpose of recovery, the stimulus cannot be just about shovel-ready projects. As I argue in my forthcoming book, Mission Economy, investment must be driven by goals and moonshots around our biggest societal challenges. The UN Sustainable Development Goals provide the north star — targets around strengthening health systems, reimagining the future of mobility and narrowing the digital divide. We need a redesign of industrial strategy and procurement policy to focus on these goals and bottom-up experimentation to reach those goals.
Second, we must learn from the mistakes made after the financial crisis when companies were bailed out only to see their profits soar later. In bad times their risks were socialised, in good times they were privatised. One way is to impose strict conditionalities on government assistance, so that it protects the public interest. In France, bailouts for the car and airline industries were linked to emission-reduction requirements. In Denmark, state aid was denied to companies that use offshore tax havens. This should become more normal. Conditionalities are about moving away from a subsidy mentality towards a problem-solving one.
Third, decades of privatisation, outsourcing and budget cuts in the name of “efficiency” have harmed government responses to the Covid-19 crisis. Proper investment in dynamic state capabilities is why, say, Vietnam can rapidly set up low-cost testing of children during a pandemic, but rich countries such as the US and UK lag behind. Theodore Agnew’s comments that an over-reliance on consulting companies “infantilises” government are spot on. We should heed his advice and allow “our brightest [public servants] opportunities to work on some of the most challenging, fulfilling and crunchy issues” of our time.
Fourth, in an era when most global flows of money were reinvested into finance, insurance and real estate, it is good news that the UK government is considering building an infrastructure bank. The strength of public investment banks is that they “pick the willing” — they provide patient, long-term finance to actors that will address concerns identified by government policy, such as a green transition. We also need new measures of success that go beyond gross domestic product, and policy evaluation methods that go beyond cost-benefit analyses.
Fifth, not only businesses but workers and public institutions create value. A citizens’ dividend, giving people equal shares in a fund tied to the national wealth, would transform the story of government intervention and create a more equitable economy. Giving the population a direct stake in the value that a country produces would be a concrete way to socialise both risks and rewards. Just as important, is the process by which different voices come to the table to design our future, for example, via citizens’ assemblies.
Sixth, science and medical innovation thrive and progress when researchers exchange and share knowledge openly. This is especially true when it comes to developing, manufacturing and distributing a vaccine during a pandemic. A “people’s vaccine” means making sure patents promote collective intelligence in the form of a patent pool. Pricing and distribution must allow global access. The same principles should govern digital platforms. The internet and Global Positioning System were both outcomes of public investment. We must ensure they are used to create public value and to eliminate the digital divide.
In sum, “building back better” requires a fundamentally new relationship between all economic actors willing and able to tackle complexity to achieve outcomes that matter.”
Central Banking’s Green Mission 12/2020 MARIANA MAZZUCATO JOSH RYAN-COLLINS ASKER VOLDSGAARD
Since the 2008 global financial crisis, central banks have shown time and again that they have the power to maintain the economic status quo. Now, they must use that power to support a timely green transition.
project-syndicate.org – 03 -2020 Capitalism’s Triple Crisis by MARIANA MAZZUCATO
After the 2008 financial crisis, we learned the hard way what happens when governments flood the economy with unconditional liquidity, rather than laying the foundation for a sustainable and inclusive recovery. Now that an even more severe crisis is underway, we must not repeat the same mistake.
Capitalism is facing at least three major crises. A pandemic-induced health crisis has rapidly ignited an economic crisis with yet unknown consequences for financial stability, and all of this is playing out against the backdrop of a climate crisis that cannot be addressed by “business as usual.” Until just two months ago, the news media were full of frightening images of overwhelmed firefighters, not overwhelmed health-care providers.
This triple crisis has revealed several problems with how we do capitalism, all of which must be solved at the same time that we address the immediate health emergency. Otherwise, we will simply be solving problems in one place while creating new ones elsewhere. That is what happened with the 2008 financial crisis. Policymakers flooded the world with liquidity without directing it toward good investment opportunities. As a result, the money ended up back in a financial sector that was (and remains) unfit for purpose.
The COVID-19 crisis is exposing still more flaws in our economic structures, not least the increasing precarity of work, owing to the rise of the gig economy and a decades-long deterioration of workers’ bargaining power. Telecommuting simply is not an option for most workers, and although governments are extending some assistance to workers with regular contracts, the self-employed may find themselves left high and dry.
marketwatch 15/10/2019 Opinion: Mobilizing for a climate moonshot By Mariana Mazzucato ‘We choose to fight climate change in this decade not because it is easy, but because it is hard’
The big failure of small government by Mariana Mazzucato and Giulio Quaggiotto May 2020 – It is no coincidence that countries with mission-driven governments have fared better in the Covid-19 crisis than those beholden to the cult of efficiency.
newstatesman 4-2021 Mariana Mazzucato: “It would be a pity if the UK splits up” – The Scottish government economic adviser on the dangers of independence and her new book on the “mission economy” – By George Eaton
Mariana Mazzucato: “It would be a pity if the UK splits up” – The Scottish government economic adviser on the dangers of independence and her new book on the “mission economy”.
Mariana Mazzucato has become one of the world’s most garlanded and influential economists. The 52-year-old Italian-American has been cited by Pope Francis, Bill Gates and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and holds advisory posts at a dizzying number of institutions, including the United Nations, the South African government, the OECD and the World Health Organisation.
Of all her roles, the most politically intriguing is her membership of the Scottish government’s Council of Economic Advisers (which she joined in 2015). An hour before we spoke on 26 March, Alex Salmond announced the launch of his new Alba Party with the stated aim of achieving a “supermajority” for independence at the Scottish election.
Does Mazzucato believe that a second referendum should be held? “Oh god, I don’t know, that’s not my area. I’m an adviser for Nicola Sturgeon on her council but we don’t ever talk about any of that. We do the underlying nitty-gritty stuff: inclusive growth, mission-oriented, Scottish National Investment Bank, I helped set that up.”
This, however, did not deter Mazzucato from warning of the risks of independence. “It would be a pity if the UK splits up,” she told me, adding that “if you look at where growth would come from in Scotland on its own, it’s not clear whether it would be in a better or worse position”.
Why does she believe it would be a pity if the UK breaks up? “Already it’s a pity that they [the UK] got out of Europe in terms of being any sort of mighty force. Even more so if you then split up the little that’s left.”
Mazzucato, who is the founding director of UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, added: “The economies of scale and scope are stronger with the United Kingdom. But if they have different strategies – if, for example, you have a Scotland, and I’m just saying theoretically, that really does believe in strengthening the welfare state, that does believe in inclusive growth, that does believe in public banks and England doesn’t – then, actually, maybe together it becomes more of a headache because it’s a constant battle.”
In her new book, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, Mazzucato argues that governments must emulate the ambition that put a man on the moon in order to address the defining economic and social ills of this century. Rather than merely fixing markets, she has long emphasised, governments need to actively create and shape them (the theme of her first book, The Entrepreneurial State).
“Getting to the moon and back in one generation required lots of different sectors to innovate,” Mazzucato said. “Hundreds of companies took part but what was so interesting – and we don’t have this today – is that they [the US government] designed the partnership to prevent exactly the kind of partnerships we have today, like PFI schemes or the healthcare sector in general, which I would call parasitic partnerships where you have huge amounts of public money going in and the private sector not only free-riding on that but also basically then running the show.”
In this regard, the UK’s Covid-19 vaccine roll-out has appeared a model of public-private innovation and state entrepreneurship. “It’s so ridiculous for Boris Johnson to say that it’s due to greed,” Mazzucato said. “It’s actually a perfect example of a strong industrial-science policy. What I have been impressed by, because we all know that medicine comes from these ecosystems of public and private actors, is that the roll-out through the NHS and through community-based GP practices was incredibly successful compared to the complete disaster of the outsourced Test and Trace roll-out.”
Mazzucato was born in Rome in 1968 and moved to the US at the age of five when her father, Ernesto, a nuclear fusion physicist, was recruited by Princeton University in New Jersey. Her mother, Alessandra, taught Italian literature and cooking; one of the guests at her gatherings was John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning game theorist depicted in the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind.
From 2017-19, Mazzucato was a special adviser to the EU commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation. What does she believe led to Europe’s vaccine debacle? “It [the roll-out] was too slow. If you get the timing wrong, whether you’re fighting a war or a pandemic, you’re going to be screwed.”
In a self-critical moment, French President Emmanuel Macron recently lamented that Europe “didn’t shoot for the stars… We were wrong to lack ambition, to lack the madness”. But Mazzucato said the problem was simpler: “It’s not so much ambition, it’s just ‘get your fucking act together’. Get smart people in who know what to do with procurement.”
She is quick, however, to rebuke those who suggest that the UK and Europe’s relative vaccine performances have vindicated Brexit. “It’s really unfortunate with the Brexit timing because it ends up looking, wrongly, as if the lesson is ‘oh it was the right thing to get out of Europe because it’s a big, bad bureaucratic machine’.”
Mazzucato added: “Brexit massively reduced [businesses’] expectations of future growth opportunities in the UK, this is tragic. Why? Because business investment as a proportion of GDP is already below the OECD average, this country continues to grow through consumption-led growth and that consumption is mainly fuelled by private debt.”
Does she believe, like some, that the pandemic marks the end of globalisation or at least a phase of it? “If anything it’s the opposite: we’re only as healthy as our neighbours,” Mazzucato replied. “We all know that, right? So had this pandemic began in Africa, where health systems are much weaker than China, we would all be worse off. So hopefully on that level it’s a massive internationalisation agenda that comes out of that.
“In terms of the nationalistic tendencies which we’ve seen before – EU versus Britain versus US versus Africa – I really hope that’s a blip. It’s such a problem, that kind of vaccine apartheid. I just can’t imagine if that continues, it would be a massive human rights scandal, a crime.”
blogslse.ac.uk 17-4-2021 Book Review: Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism by Mariana Mazzucato -by Flora Parkin
nature.com 9/01/2021 Lessons from the Moonshot for fixing global problems The influential economist behind Europe’s research-funding plan lays out her reasoning. by Jayati Ghosh
irishtimes.com 1-2021 Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism – Slightly off target – The great Mariana Mazzucato’s creativity is stifled by the ‘moonshot’ analogy – Paschal Donohoe
irishtimes.com 5-2020 ‘The recovery needs to be a full-scale economic renewal’ Mariana Mazzucato on ‘doing economics differently’ in a post-Covid-19 world Cliff Taylor
WIRED.CO.UK 2019 This economist has a plan to fix capitalism It’s time we all listened by JOÃO MEDEIROS 10/2019
Mariana Mazzucato has demonstrated that the real driver of innovation isn’t lone geniuses but state investment. Now she’s working with the UK government, EU and UN to apply her moonshot approach to the world’s biggest challenges
…”…But a narrative of innovation that omitted the role of the state was exactly what corporations had been deploying as they lobbied for lax regulation and low taxation… That posed an urgent, more fundamental problem. If it was the state, not the private sector, which had traditionally assumed the risks of uncertain technological enterprises that led to the development of aviation, nuclear energy, computers, nanotechnology, biotechnology and the internet, how were we going to find the next wave of technologies to tackle urgent challenges such as catastrophic climate change, the epidemic of antibiotic resistance, the rise of dementia? “History tells us that innovation is an outcome of a massive collective effort – not just from a narrow group of young white men in California,” Mazzucato says. “And if we want to solve the world’s biggest problems, we better understand that. …”
read whole article below
strategy-business.com Mission Critical 04/2019 Mariana Mazzucato explains how solving society’s toughest problems starts with rethinking how value is created and innovation is incentivized. by Deborah Unger
Mission Economy by Mariana Mazzucato The Times review by Emma Duncan
This radical plan is moonshine – Running a country is not like getting a man on the moon. This call for a big, active state is simple-minded, says Emma Duncan
washingtonpost.com 12/ 2020 next-big-idea-climate-change-economy/ Mazzucato – Tom Steyer – Frances Stead Sellers
The Economist review Fly me to the Moon Mariana Mazzucato wants to revive the Apollo spirit. But is today’s America equipped for the effort recommended in “Mission Economy”? “In July 1969 America launched three astronauts into space, landed two of them on the surface of the Moon and safely returned all three to Earth. A remarkable demonstration of American might, the achievement still dazzles more than half a century later; no country on Earth could replicate the feat today. The contrast with America’s bumbling response to covid-19 could scarcely be more glaring.
In “Mission Economy” Mariana Mazzucato argues that societies ought to abjure tired ideologies and embrace the policy approach that put astronauts on the Moon. By setting grand missions for themselves, she writes, and deploying the power of the state in practical ways, they can become more prosperous and equitable. It is an appealing idea, even if America has rarely looked less capable of purposeful collective action.
Ms Mazzucato is an Italian-born economist of a heterodox bent, whose work has long challenged standard economic thinking about the role of markets and government in generating innovation. Her best-known book, “The Entrepreneurial State” (published in 2013), argued that American technological prowess is owed in large part to the strong influence of the federal government, which funded and bore the risk of the initial development of many critical 20th-century technologies. Conventional economic wisdom remains a target in her latest work, too.
Scepticism among dismal scientists about government involvement in markets is based on faulty assumptions, she insists. Common complaints about state meddling—that governments are less efficient than private firms, cannot pick winners, and are staffed by self-interested bureaucrats concerned only with their own status—are belied by an impressive record of government successes: developing the foundation of the internet, for instance, or extending financial assistance to Tesla. Not every public investment pays off. But, in Ms Mazzucato’s view, neither is the record of privatisation of public assets and outsourcing of public tasks an unmitigated triumph. In America and Britain they have produced plenty of wealthy consultants, she says, but not a revolution in public-service efficiency or vast savings.
A rethink is thus overdue, the author urges—and the Apollo programme reveals many ways in which a capable state can create economic value. The sense of purpose and urgency that infused the programme in the 1960s motivated the government agencies involved to innovate, Ms Mazzucato writes, as well as to improve communication and weed out inefficiencies. Retaining important technological capabilities in-house enabled nasa to engage in a more sophisticated fashion with private contractors and monitor their progress better. It also helped the government retain talent, since working for the state could involve meaningful engineering work, not just banal paper-pushing.
And the programme’s technological demands—like the need for smaller, more powerful and more reliable computers than were available at its inception—put pressure on contractors to innovate. They did so, fearlessly, because the state shouldered much of the risk associated with moonshot technologies. The government’s demand for cutting-edge kit sowed the seeds of the computing age to come. The mit Instrumentation Laboratory, tapped to develop guidance and navigation systems for the mission, swept up 60% of America’s output of integrated circuits at the peak of the Apollo effort. For its part, nasa helped shape the industrial ecosystem of America’s tech sector: to avoid becoming too dependent on any one contractor, it spread business around, implanting know-how across many firms.
These points are compelling. State projects can certainly go wrong, but there is no mistaking the vital role governments played in facilitating the development of rich economies. Conversely, the weakening of state capacity—to provide badly needed infrastructure and basic services, educate citizens, root out corruption, and so on—has hurt America’s dynamism and the welfare of its people. There is no shortage of daunting global problems in need of solving; Ms Mazzucato singles out the fight against climate change, campaigns to improve public health and efforts to narrow the digital divide.
Yet in the end it is hard to feel inspired by her book. America launched the Apollo programme at what may well have been the zenith of its state capacity. Not only was the government at its most capable, but state initiatives enjoyed maximum public legitimacy and confidence. That proficiency had been forged during decades of crisis: two world wars, a devastating depression and an existential superpower stand-off against the Soviet Union. The bipartisan consensus that supported a strong state shattered long ago; a new sense of national unity and purpose cannot be conjured out of thin air.
Arresting as Ms Mazzucato’s views on economic development are, her book does not really offer a route back to that purpose and cohesion. But that is what America needs most. Sadly, those goals look as remote and inaccessible as the Moon.
source: The Economist
FT review by John Kay Mission Economy A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, by Mariana Mazzucato
Ever since 1969, people have asked themselves why if humans can land on the moon, can’t they solve pressing problems here on Earth, such as poverty, dementia and climate change. Mariana Mazzucato offers an answer: if only governments would apply the mission-driven methods of the Apollo project, they could.
Mission Economy, the new book from the high-profile economist noted for her advocacy of a more active state, contains many screenshots of the whiteboards beloved of brainstorming meetings, each with an ambitious goal at the top: secure the future of mobility, clean oceans, defeat cancer; below is a jumble of boxes and circles linked by multidirectional arrows. We need a “solutions based economy”, driven and co-ordinated by more powerful governments engaged in every stage of the process of innovation.
But Apollo was a success because the objective was specific and limited; the basic science was well understood, even if many subsidiary technological developments were needed to make the mission feasible; and the political commitment to the project was sufficiently strong to make budget overruns almost irrelevant. Centrally directed missions have sometimes succeeded when these conditions are in place; Apollo was a response to the Soviet Union’s pioneering launch of a human into space, and the greatest achievement of the USSR was the mobilisation of resources to defeat Nazi Germany.
Nixon’s war on cancer, explicitly modelled on the Apollo programme, was a failure because cancer is not a single illness and too little was then — or now — understood about the science of cell mutation. Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a vain bid to create an industrial society within five years, proved to be one of the greatest economic and humanitarian disasters in human history. At least 30m people died.
The ‘new frontier’ of the late 1960s turned out to be, not space, but IT — characterised by a striking absence of centralised vision and direction
Democratic societies have more checks and balances to protect them from visionary leaders driven by missions and enthused by moonshots, but the characteristics which made the Great Leap Forward a catastrophe are nevertheless still evident in attenuated version.
With political direction of innovation we regularly encounter grandiosity of ambition and scale; the belief that strength of commitment overcomes practical problems; an absence of honest feedback; the suppression of sceptical comment and marginalisation of sceptical commentators.
All these were seen in Britain’s experience with Concorde, the Channel Tunnel and the AGR nuclear reactor programme, some of the worst commercial projects in history. More recently, there is the £12bn wasted on the NHS computerisation programme — a project that Mazzucato mentions, though only to blame private contractors for their failure to deliver on the political imperative.
On a smaller scale, Britain has suffered in the last year from the delays resulting from Public Health England’s insistence on central control of the coronavirus testing programme and the predictable fiasco of the attempt to sideline the expertise of Apple and Google in order to develop a uniquely advanced NHS test and trace app. And in September there was prime minister Boris Johnson’s “operation moonshot”, designed to control the coronavirus by testing 10m people daily in early 2021.
In contrast to these failures, the rapid development of vaccines is, at least provisionally, a success story. That development is not the product of visionary central direction but is the result of a competitive process with many different teams around the world attempting to be among the first across the finishing line.
Their work has drawn on a combination of existing academic science with the expertise in development and testing and the manufacturing and logistics capabilities of the global pharmaceutical industry. The role of government, appropriately, has primarily been in funding basic research and assuring that there will be a rewarding market for successful products.
The decentralised process in which developers draw on and help create the collective intelligence leads to constant incremental improvement in so many fields
Mazzucato lists “twenty things we wouldn’t have without space travel”. Athletic shoes, CAT scanners, home insulation, baby formula, artificial limbs. Yes, really. But beyond the ridiculous headline, we see the reality of productive innovation: a decentralised process in which developers draw on and help create the collective intelligence that leads to constant incremental improvement in so many fields — including better running shoes.
When historians of technology review the past 50 years, they may conclude that Neil Armstrong exaggerated when he announced “one giant leap for mankind”. The “new frontier” of the late 1960s turned out to be, not space, but information technology. And the development of IT was characterised by a striking absence of centralised vision and direction.
No moonshots; but piecemeal innovation through disciplined pluralism in which temporary winners were almost always displaced as they failed to anticipate the next step of the journey. Do you remember Digital Equipment, Word Perfect, Wang Laboratories, CompuServe, Netscape, AOL, BlackBerry? Each once a leader, now forgotten. Even Apple suffered more than one near-death experience, Microsoft failed to anticipate mobile computing or the cloud, IBM was swept out of the industry it had created.
Mazzucato has correctly emphasised the contribution of state funded basic research to Silicon Valley, but thank goodness the development was in the hands of Steve Jobs, Travis Kalanick and Elon Musk rather than a committee in the department of commerce.
No one has, or could have, the knowledge of present or future required to create or implement successfully the strategies that Mazzucato recommends. Take her modern signature example — Germany’s Energiewende, or energy transition to renewables. You will not learn from Mission Economy that this highly political, much publicised and wildly expensive project has brought about significantly smaller reductions in carbon emissions than Britain’s quiet, economically and socially beneficial substitution of gas for coal.
The failure of the Energiewende illustrates the dangers of moonshots and the mission economy. As talk of a “Green New Deal” becomes more frequent on both sides of the Atlantic, the prospect of more large, costly and ineffectual visionary projects grows.
Politicians readily fall in love with such proposals, and Mazzucato is not shy in reminding us how anxious they are to engage with her in discussing them. But the vision that propelled China’s economic development was not Mao’s Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution, but Deng’s “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white if it catches mice”. It is more rewarding and effective to build better mousetraps than to shoot for a mice-free world. source: FT review by John Kay
Mariana Mazzucato has demonstrated that the real driver of innovation isn’t lone geniuses but state investment. Now she’s working with the UK government, EU and UN to apply her moonshot approach to the world’s biggest challenges
The idea that made Mariana Mazzucato one of the most influential economists in the world came to her in early 2011. It had been three years since the financial crisis of 2008 and, in the UK, the coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats had chosen to pursue a fiscal policy of austerity that was forcing councils to cut back public services and leading to a rise of homelessness and crime. “In my neighbourhood after-school clubs, youth centres, public libraries, policing and mental health budgets were all cut, affecting the most vulnerable people in society,” she recalls. “It was very sad.”
What particularly infuriated Mazzucato was the prevailing narrative that such cuts were necessary to boost competitiveness and innovation. In March 2011, Prime Minister David Cameron gave a speech excoriating civil servants working in government, labelling them “enemies of enterprise”. Later that year, in November, he visited the Truman Brewery in east London to announce his plans for a new technology cluster called Tech City. “They were hyping up entrepreneurs and dismissing everyone else,” Mazzucato says. “There was this belief that we didn’t have European Googles and Facebooks because we didn’t subscribe to Silicon Valley’s free market approach. It was just ideology: there was no free market in Silicon Valley.”
It was then that Mazzucato, an Italian-American economist who had spent decades researching the economics of innovation and the high tech industry, decided to look deeper into the early history of some of the world’s most innovative companies. The development of Google’s search algorithm, for instance, had been supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, a US public grant-awarding body. Electric car company Tesla initially struggled to secure investment until it received a $465 million (£380 million) loan from the US Department of Energy. In fact, three companies founded by Elon Musk — Tesla, SolarCity and SpaceX — had jointly benefited from nearly $4.9 billion (£3.9bn) in public support of various kinds. Many other well-known US startups had been funded by the Small Business Innovation Research programme, a public venture capital fund. “It wasn’t just early research, it was also applied research, early stage finance, strategic procurement,” she says. “The more I looked, the more I realised: state investment is everywhere.”
Mazzucato included her findings in a 150-page pamphlet she submitted to UK policy think tank Demos. It was distributed to thousands of policymakers, and received coverage in daily newspapers. “It was obvious that it had touched a nerve,” she says. “The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to go straight to the core of the myths about innovation.” She decided to dissect the product that symbolised Silicon Valley’s engineering prowess: the iPhone.
Mazzucato traced the provenance of every technology that made the iPhone. The HTTP protocol, of course, had been developed by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee and implemented on the computers at CERN, in Geneva. The internet began as a network of computers called Arpanet, funded by the US Department of Defense (DoD) in the 60s to solve the problem of satellite communication. The DoD was also behind the development of GPS during the 70s, initially to determine the location of military equipment. The hard disk drive, microprocessors, memory chips and LCD display had also been funded by the DoD. Siri was the outcome of a Stanford Research Institute project to develop a virtual assistant for military staff, commissioned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The touchscreen was the result of graduate research at the University of Delaware, funded by the National Science Foundation and the CIA.
“Steve Jobs has rightly been called a genius for the visionary products he conceived and marketed, [but] this story creates a myth about the origin of Apple’s success,” Mazzucato writes in her 2013 book The Entrepreneurial State. “Without the massive amount of public investment behind the computer and internet revolutions, such attributes might have led only to the invention of a new toy.”
But a narrative of innovation that omitted the role of the state was exactly what corporations had been deploying as they lobbied for lax regulation and low taxation. According to a study by Mazzucato and economist Bill Lazonick, between 2003 and 2013 publicly listed companies in the S&P 500 index used more than half of their earnings to buy back their shares to boost stock prices, rather than reinvesting it back into further research and development. Pharmaceutical company Pfizer, for example, spent $139bn (£112bn) on share buybacks. Apple, which had never engaged in this type of financial engineering under Jobs, started doing so in 2012. By 2018, it had spent nearly one trillion dollars on share buybacks. “Those profits could be used to fund research and training for workers,” Mazzucato says. “Instead they are often used on share buybacks and golfing.”
That posed an urgent, more fundamental problem. If it was the state, not the private sector, which had traditionally assumed the risks of uncertain technological enterprises that led to the development of aviation, nuclear energy, computers, nanotechnology, biotechnology and the internet, how were we going to find the next wave of technologies to tackle urgent challenges such as catastrophic climate change, the epidemic of antibiotic resistance, the rise of dementia? “History tells us that innovation is an outcome of a massive collective effort – not just from a narrow group of young white men in California,” Mazzucato says. “And if we want to solve the world’s biggest problems, we better understand that.”
One of Mazzucato’s most enduring memories of her childhood is watching her father Ernesto, a nuclear fusion physicist at Princeton University, yelling at the news. She would say, “Dad, that’s just information,” to which he would reply: “That’s not information, that’s just what they’re trying to make you believe.” “A critical eye was the first thing my dad instilled in me, mainly just from watching him swear at the TV,” Mazzucato says. After the publication of The Entrepreneurial State, Mazzucato, an effervescent woman in her late forties, became a regular on current affairs programmes, often delivering devastating critiques of commonly held economic beliefs with eloquence. During a debate about the budget deficit on Newsnight in 2017, she berated Evan Davis for obsessing about it, explaining with exasperation: “Deficits matter, but what matters is what you’re spending it on.” When asked about Google’s tax avoidance by Jon Snow on Channel 4 News, she retorted: “You know what? That’s not the problem. The real problem is that people don’t know about the backroom deals that the Googles and the Apples and the Glaxos and the Pfizers have with the treasuries around the world on tax policy.”
That the message at the core of her book had resonated with a general audience didn’t necessarily surprise Mazzucato. “Silicon Valley entrepreneurs rarely acknowledged that they were standing on the shoulders of giants. It was a call to arms to innovators to sort of step up and acknowledge that,” says Saul Klein, co-founder of venture capital firm LocalGlobe. “There has been a very concerted effort, over the past 40 years, to build this intellectual construct that was sold to government and sold to society about the free market, supported by businessmen who were trying to tell a story that was advantageous to them,” says tech mogul Tim O’Reilly. “It’s now very clear that there’s something wrong with the story. We need a new theory to replace this, and Mariana is one of the economists trying to build a rival narrative.”
Mazzucato was surprised to find supporters inside the coalition government. “To be honest, given that I had mainly written academic things, there was no real risk that I sounded like a communist,” she says. That support came in the form of Business Secretary Vince Cable, who founded the Catapult centres to promote partnerships between scientists and entrepreneurs; and the “eight great technologies” investment announced by David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science. “There’s been a gap in conservatism in offering a constructive account of the role of the state,” Willetts says. “Mariana provided an account of the role of government which was neither one of minimal government nor traditional socialism. I was able to say in government, hang on, this isn’t some experiment with left-wing socialism. This is what happens in Republican America.”
Soon, she became a regular visitor at Whitehall, advising both Cable and Willetts on policies such as the Small Business Research Initiative, which funded small and medium enterprises, and the patent box, which reduced the rate of corporate tax on income derived from patents (which she calls “the stupidest policy ever”).
Mazzucato knew that to influence politicians she would need to do more than just criticise. “The reason progressives often lose the argument is that they focus too much on wealth redistribution and not enough on wealth creation,” she says. “We need a progressive narrative that’s not only about spending, but investing in smarter ways.”
At the time, Mazzucato was increasingly interested in what she called mission-oriented organisations. The prime example was DARPA, the research agency founded by President Eisenhower in 1958 following the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik. The agency pumped billions of dollars into the development of prototypes that preceded commercial technology such as Microsoft Windows, videoconferencing, Google Maps, Linux and the cloud. In Israel, Yozma, a government-backed venture capital fund that ran between 1993 and 1998, supported more than 40 companies. In the UK, the Government Digital Service, launched in 2010, was behind the award-winning .gov.uk domain, saving the government £1.7bn in IT procurement. “When I use the word ‘state’ I am talking about a decentralised network of different state agencies,” she says. When such agencies are mission-oriented to solve problems and structured to take risks, they can be an engine of innovation.”
To Mazzucato, the epitome of the mission-oriented concept was the Apollo programme, the space programme designed to land Americans on the Moon and return them safely to Earth. Between 1960 and 1972, the US government spent $26bn (£21bn) to achieve precisely that. More than 300 different projects contributed, not only in aeronautics but in areas such as nutrition, textiles, electronics and medicine, resulting in 1,800 spinoff products, from freeze-dried food to cooling suits, spring tyres and digital fly-by-wire flight control systems used in commercial airplanes. The programme was also instrumental in kick-starting an industry for the integrated circuit, an unproven technology at the time, and other space projects such as the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station.
The modus operandi of these mission-oriented institutions provided Mazzucato with an alternative vocabulary that told a different story about the role of the state. “Economics is full of stories,” she says. “Words like ‘enabling’, ‘facilitating’, ‘spending’, ‘regulating’ – they create a story of the state as boring and inertial. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We need a new narrative to guide better policies.” These mission-oriented institutions were actively creating and shaping markets, rather than merely fixing them. They were ambitiously seeking high-risk directions for research and investment, rather than outsourcing and avoiding uncertainty.
Mazzucato’s collaboration with Whitehall was put on hold after the 2015 general election: Willetts stood down from his seat, and Cable lost his. By then, however, she had gone global – working with US Democrat Elizabeth Warren on public funding for health innovation, and advising Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon on the development of a Scottish national investment bank. Mazzucato also launched a new type of economics department at University College London, the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) – with the mission of training the next generation of civil servants in the theory of mission-oriented policies. “We want to them to think strategically and ambitiously for the public good and, in the words of Steve Jobs, to ‘stay hungry and stay foolish’,” she says.
In early 2017, Carlos Moedas, the European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, offered her a position as special adviser, which she accepted. “I wanted the work to have an impact,” she says. “Otherwise it’s champagne socialism: you go in, talk every now and then, and nothing happens.” She suggested reframing the European research and innovation programme as Horizon Europe, a €100bn (£90bn) mission-oriented initiative due to start in 2020. Moedas gave her carte blanche to pursue the project.
The European Commission had traditionally framed its policies in terms of grand challenges, but Mazzucato’s concept of missions translates these into concrete projects: the Cold War was a challenge; landing on the moon was a mission. In February 2018, she published a report — titled Mission-Oriented Research & Innovation in the European Union — that defined five criteria missions should obey: they must be bold and inspire citizens; be ambitious and risky; have a clear target and deadline (you have to be able to unambiguously answer whether the mission was accomplished to deadline or not, Mazzucato says); be cross-disciplinary and cross-sectorial (eradicating cancer, for example, would require innovation in healthcare, nutrition, artificial intelligence and pharmaceuticals); and allow for experimentation and multiple attempts at a solution, rather than be micromanaged top-down by a government.
In the report, she illustrated what missions could look like with three hypothetical examples: a plastic-free ocean, 100 carbon-neutral cities by 2030, and cutting dementia by 50 per cent. The clean oceans mission could involve removing half of the plastic already polluting the oceans and reducing by 90 per cent the quantity of plastics entering them before 2025, through projects such as autonomous plastic collection stations or distributed nets. The solution would require inventing alternatives to plastic, designing novel forms of food packaging, and creating AI systems that could separate waste automatically. “These were just examples to tease out the difficulties,” Mazzucato says. “When people talk about missions, I always warn them: if this is something that makes you feel comfortable and happy and cosy, then you haven’t understood it, because it’s actually about fundamentally changing how we think about innovation.”
In March 2018, Mazzucato was contacted by two members of a progressive political movement in the US called Justice Democrats. She had no idea who Saikat Chakrabarti and Zack Exley were. “They were saying that they were trying to bring in a new wave of young politicians,” she recalls. “It was more curiosity from my side of hearing what’s going on in the US, because I had sort of lost touch.”
Chakrabarti and Exley had previously worked for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Chakrabarti then co-founded a political action committee with the aim of recruiting 400 working class candidates to run for Congress. “The idea was to create a new caucus within the Democratic Party,” Chakrabarti says. “We have people like Donald Trump in the White House, the Democratic Party leadership is acting as if it’s still 1995. The real divide is not between left and right. It’s between ambition and not ambition. We wanted an alternative vision of society that’s revolutionary. What was exciting about meeting Mariana is that there weren’t a lot of people in the US talking about those kinds of ideas.”
In London, at Mazzucato’s home in Camden, they told her that, in three months, they were hoping to have elected officials in Congress who would be willing to talk about big policy ideas, particularly around environmental change. One of their most promising candidates was a young bartender from New York. Her name was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
In June 2018, Ocasio-Cortez defeated 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary, shocking the political establishment and in effect guaranteeing herself a place in Congress.
A month later, Mazzucato and Ocasio-Cortez spoke over Skype for the first time. Their conversation revolved around a new, ambitious industrial policy that the Justice Democrats were calling the Green New Deal. Mazzucato had been one of the originators, in collaboration with the economist Carlota Perez. “The most important thing is to stop thinking that we should sacrifice our way of life in order to solve our environmental problems,” Perez says. “We always thought of it as an opportunity to transform our society in a way that is also fairer and socially sustainable.”
To Mazzucato, a Green New Deal could be as bold as the 1969 moonshot. “When my book came out, Bill Gates invited me to come to Seattle,” she says. “He told me that he had followed the lead of the public sector when it came to IT. And now he was concerned that he couldn’t see the public leading in green in the same way.” A Green New Deal would involve, as she puts it, “greening the entire economy”, transforming not only the renewable energy industry but every single aspect of manufacturing. It would require tax incentives and disincentives to tackle high polluters and to encourage innovation around areas like waste and durability. It would require patient, long-term finance.
On September 11, Mazzucato and Ocasio-Cortez met face to face at the Firefly restaurant, the latter’s local hangout in Sunnyside, New York. They spoke about everything from the issue of public return for public investment to the notion of market co-creation versus market fixing. “She’s quite academic,” Mazzucato says. “It was much easier to talk to her about these things than it normally is with a politician who just wants the slogans, but doesn’t really get the details behind the message.”
Ocasio-Cortez also asked the economist for advice on how to get her message across to voters. In 2009, when Obama was proposing his healthcare reform, he had to assure people that government bureaucrats weren’t meddling. That was fine, but it didn’t capture the imagination of the public, Mazzucato said. He should have said that, actually, public-funded agencies were not just regulating – they were financing most of the innovation in the healthcare system. The pharmaceutical industry gets $32bn (£25bn) a year of innovation financing from the a state agency – the National Institutes of Health – condition free, and yet taxpayers still had to pay extortionate prices for life-saving drugs. It made no sense. “Get the language right,” Mazzucato told Ocasio-Cortez. “Otherwise, you’re just going to be a nice social democratic, boring lefty politician.”
In February 2019, Ocasio-Cortez released her first piece of legislation as a congresswoman: a 14-page resolution on the Green New Deal, which she called the “moonshot of our generation”. A few weeks later, during a congressional hearing on the drug industry, she asked Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine from Harvard: “Would it be correct, Dr Kesselheim, to characterize the NIH money that is being used in development and research as an early investment? The public is acting as an early investor in the production of these drugs. Is the public receiving any sort of direct return on that investment from the highly profitable drugs that are developed from that research?”
“No,” Kesselheim replied.
One afternoon in May 2019, Mazzucato sat alongside David Willets in a packed lecture theatre at University College London. She stood up and introduced herself to the audience. Then she pointed towards a stack of 100-page yellow reports on the desk. The cover read “A Mission-Oriented UK Industrial Strategy”. “This is what we’ve been doing for the past year,” she reflected. “We’ve been working really hard and this is the outcome.”
Almost exactly a year before, then British Prime Minister Theresa May had delivered a speech at Jodrell Bank Observatory about the government’s new industrial strategy, which was centered around four grand challenges: clean growth, mobility, healthy ageing and AI. May announced one mission for each challenge: halving the energy use in new buildings by 2030; using AI to transform treatment of chronic disease; extending healthy, independent life to five extra years; being at the forefront of zero-emission vehicle manufacturing by 2040. These had already been a direct outcome of Mazzucato’s influence with the then business secretary, Greg Clark. Months before, Clark had contacted Mazzucato to learn more about mission-oriented policies. He later asked her to co-chair a commission with Willets and coordinate cross-departmental mission teams in Whitehall, inspired by DARPA.
Over a year, the commission met every month. “We found that putting into practice Mariana’s five criteria for what missions should be a lot harder than expected,” Rainer Kattel, IIPP’s deputy director, says.
For instance, the commission deemed the mission for the future of mobility as unambitious and too siloed within the Department of Transport. “That target was going to happen anyway,” Kattel says. “We went back to them and said that it was too low-hanging. The biggest surprise was that they were very open to our criticism.”
Regarding the healthy ageing mission, they struggled with the definition of “healthiness” “How do you even measure that?” Mazzucato asks. Initially, they considered the scenario of an Alzheimer’s patient who is completely independent in the home and assisted by cutting-edge technologies. But the mission leader didn’t like the idea. “Why obsess about independence?” She said. “How about nurturing co-dependency instead?”
On the future of mobility, the musician Brian Eno, one of the Institute’s advisors, questioned the assumption that getting from A to B quicker was the goal. “How about going slower and appreciating life?”
The year-long collaboration between the IIPP and Whitehall included a series of workshops around the theory of mission-oriented policies, delivered by Mazzucato and her team to civil servants in Whitehall. “These were, after all, people that had been constantly told to get out of the way and stop stifling innovation. It can get depressing,” Mazzucato says. “Going in and giving them a different narrative about ambitious missions and dreaming the big thing, their eyes would just light up. Sometimes I felt like a life coach.”
Some of those conversations, however, were challenging — particularly regarding the policy appraisals conducted by the Treasury. “As the Chancellor of the Exchequer, all across government 20 people come to you with different policy proposals that you can spend the money on. How do you decide which one will have the biggest impact or is the most worthy?” says George Dibbs, the head of industrial strategy at IIPP. The standard method of appraisal, used by governments around the world, is cost-benefit analysis, in which a simplistic quantitative estimate is made about how much a policy will cost and how much money it will generate. “It’s like the old mentality from the Vietnam war: as long as the enemy’s body count is higher, we can ignore all other variables.” Kattel says. “That’s why, for instance, some new drugs are not paid for by the NHS because not enough people can benefit from them. Bureaucrats have really lost that idea that they are somehow responsible for the people on the street.”
Cost-benefit analysis is not suitable to evaluate mission-oriented policies, which are inherently risky and uncertain, and aimed at creating new markets rather than fixing existing ones. As Mazzucato likes to point out, we would never have walked on the Moon if the Apollo Program had been evaluated via cost-benefit analysis.
At the launch of the report, Mazzucato told the audience a story to illustrate her point: in the 1500s, the Jesuits had a system that involved opening a cash box by turning two keys simultaneously — one belonged to the accountant, the second to the rector. This meant that, to open the coffer, “you had to have a vision but you also had to think about the budget,” she concluded. “I know it sounds strange, but that’s what’s missing.
”One afternoon in late June, Mazzucato sat pensively at her office in central London. A neon sign spelling “the value of everything” — a present from her husband in celebration of her second book, which has this phrase as its title — adorns one of the walls. Large posters hang on the walls depicting Mazzucato’s complex mission diagrams. Two days after the launch of the industrial strategy report, Theresa May had resigned as prime minister, potentially derailing the entire industry strategy policy and putting Mazzucato’s work with the government, once again, on hold. “Sometimes you either just want to go crawl back in bed or you fight back harder,” she says. “I tend to always do the latter.”
Mazzucato sees her work as a battle of ideas. “So much bullshit happens in the name of innovation,” she says. “As an advisor, its critical to follow up and put in the time and make the whole argument again and help people get the details right.” Sometimes, when she’s addressing an audience, she thinks to herself, ‘Oh my god, I’ve said this so many times.’ “My dad makes fun of me,” she says. “He tells me ‘Don’t people realise that you keep telling them the same thing?’ But the audience is different and the message reminds heretics in many circles.”
She laughs, because she does realise – but it’s a necessity. Recently, at the European Investment Bank, she had to tell an audience of economists: “Please never write the word ‘de-risking’ again in any of your reports, because that’s not what you’re doing. You took risks and you should able to say it openly – kind of coming out of the closet about it.”
At a talk at Nasa, where Mazzucato has been working as part of a group studying the low-Earth orbit economy, she urged them to recover the ambition befitting an agency of its calibre. “I don’t think many people realize that Novartis, one of the richest pharmaceutical companies in the world, is working for free on the International Space Station,” she says. “Who thought that up? Charge them. Or make sure the relationship is symbiotic, not parasitic.“
In May, the European Parliament voted and approved Mazzucato’s mission-oriented proposal for the Horizon Europe programme. After a lengthy consultation period, five mission areas were chosen: adaptation to climate change; cancer; healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters; climate-neutral and smart cities; and soil health and food. The European Commission will now appoint a mission board of 15 experts for each area. They will be responsible for identifying the first specific missions, following Mazzucato’s criteria. “Moedas jokingly offered me the role of chief muse of missions,” she laughs. “That report was the most important thing I’ve written. It’s now a legal instrument, it can’t be undone unless another vote is had.” She pauses. “I’ve influenced politicians, but having a parliament vote on something I wrote is just fantastic,” she continues. “That’s what I want: to bring about change.
“This article focuses on the broader lessons from mission-oriented programs for innovation policy—and indeed policies aimed at investment-led growth. While much has been written about case studies on missions, this has not resulted in an alternative policy making toolkit. Missions—in the least—require those tools to be just as much about market cocreating and market shaping, as they are about market fixing. The article reviews the characteristics of mission-oriented programs, ooks at key features of those programs that can provide lessons, and discusses how to choose and implement mission-oriented policies, with an example.”
mission-oriented-policy-innovation-report M Mazzucato
“Governments are increasingly seeking economic growth that is smart (innovation-led), inclusive and sustainable. They are trying to achieve this in a context of major social and environmental challenges such as tackling climate change, improving public health and wellbeing and adjusting to demographic changes. Mission-oriented innovation policy responds to these ‘grand challenges’ by identifying and articulating concrete problems that can galvanise production, distribution, and consumption patterns across various sectors. In doing so it recognises that:
• economic growth has not only a rate but also a direction, innovation requires investments and risk taking by both private
and public actors,
• the state has a role in not only fixing markets but also in cocreating and shaping them,
• successful innovation policy combines the need to set directions from above with the ability to enable bottom up experimentation and learning,
• missions may require consensus building in civil society.
This approach is different from narrow sector-based industrial policy.” read or downoad PDF here –marianamazzucato.com/
progressinstitute.com 11-2022 But Seriously, How Do We Make an Entrepreneurial State? – Some practical strategies for rebuilding state capacity – by Caleb Watney
progress.institute Review Essay: How to Make an Entrepreneurial State: Why Innovation Needs Bureaucracy
by Rainer Kattel, Wolfgang Drechsler, and Erkki Karo
“Gone are the debates about limited versus big government. The motivating question across most of the political spectrum today is how to build an effective government. Or perhaps less ambitiously, how can we build a government that doesn’t immediately fail when it tries something new?
Liberals are frustrated that the United States can’t build public transportation or deploy clean energy fast enough. Conservatives are increasingly interested in industrial policy to counter a rising China. Congress just passed massive science funding, infrastructure, and climate packages and is banking on the administrative state to effectively implement them. A high-inflation macroenvironment has heightened the awareness of supply-side bottlenecks across the economy and turned dredging and port automation into headline grabbers. Public intellectuals like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are writing about the importance of a liberalism that builds and the need for an “abundance agenda.” Nearly everyone is disappointed with how our public health agencies handled the Covid-19 pandemic (even as they disagree about what went wrong). …”…
Mariana Mazzucato – previous GaiaMoney Posts
2020/10/20/wiedergeburt-der-politischen-oekonomie/
gaiageld post 10-2020 Wiedergeburt der Politischen Ökonomie?
Mariana Mazzucato updates
Mariana Mazzucato.com – twitter – updates 11-2023 – deutsch weiter unten
theguardian.com 23-11-2023 Report critical of big four consultancies was censored by Australian government agency, academic claims – Peter Carey tells inquiry he was asked by Accounting Standards Board to omit details because partners from PwC, KPMG, Deloitte and EY sat on the board – by Henry Belot
bloomberg.com 22-11-2023 McKinsey and Its Peers Are Facing the Wildest Headwinds in Years – The $860 billion consulting sector is battling global economic uncertainty and the fallout from a spree of ethics scandals. By Ambereen Choudhury, Amy Bainbridge, Irina Anghel
telegraph.co.uk 1-10-2023 The consultancy racket can’t survive any more lawsuits – Slew of scandals prove the culture of major firms is rotten to its core – By Matthew Lynn
lpgcil.org/ 5-2023 The Trouble with Consulting – by Jeremy Baskin
…There will no doubt be much talk of ‘mistakes’, and many who offer a version of the ‘a few bad apples’ argument. And yet it’s clear that this incident should invite us to think about a more structural problem at play. This is the rise and role of consulting firms in reshaping the relationship between states and large corporations. Arguments in favour of a close relationship between consultants and states are underpinned by an ideology which sees no conflict between state and corporate interests, and which sees the primary frame of decision in both cases as economic efficiency.
Such questions are the subject of growing investigation, in both academic and non-academic forms. Bogdanich and Forsythe’s book, When McKinsey Comes to Town, highlights some of the practices of that company, from its role in promoting opioid sales to ‘high abuse-risk patients’ to its involvement in corruption scandals in South Africa. Bain & Company’s role in enabling state corruption in South Africa has led to it being banned from operating in that country for ten years, and even barred from UK government consultancies for three years. Problems have engulfed others too – including KPMG, EY, Deloitte and Boston Consulting Group.
A recent scholarly work, The Big Con, by Mazzucato and Collington, casts a critical eye on the sector, whose global value is estimated to range between $700 and $900 billion. An April 2023 report by the Australia Institute thinktank to a Senate inquiry into consultancies argues that over-use of consultancies has corroded the country’s democracy.
Analytically, it is perhaps useful to focus on the different roles, influences and impacts these firms have when working with governments. This is especially true when it comes to thinking about the major consulting firms, rather than smaller, niche ones. One can think of these roles as Complementing, Investigating, Shaping, and Revolving door-ing (not a word). In practice these often happen together…
law.com/americanlawyer 6-2022 Audits Woes Won’t Stop Big 4 From Taking Big Law Business From Law Firms – Law firm managing partners should take note: the Big Four are still a big threat. Bby Bruce Love
THE BIG CON
penguin.co.uk amazon 3-2023 The Big Con – How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies – by Mariana Mazzucato, Rosie Collington
Summary – There is an entrenched relationship between the consulting industry and the way business and government are managed today which must change. Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington show that our economies’ reliance on companies such as McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and EY stunts innovation, obfuscates corporate and political accountability and impedes our collective mission of halting climate breakdown.
The ‘Big Con’ describes the confidence trick the consulting industry performs in contracts with hollowed-out and risk-averse governments and shareholder value-maximizing firms. It grew from the 1980s and 1990s in the wake of reforms by both the neoliberal right and Third Way progressives, and it thrives on the ills of modern capitalism, from financialization and privatization to the climate crisis. It is possible because of the unique power that big consultancies wield through extensive contracts and networks – as advisors, legitimators and outsourcers – and the illusion that they are objective sources of expertise and capacity. To make matters worse, our best and brightest graduates are often redirected away from public service into consulting. In all these ways, the Big Con weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments and warps our economies.
Mazzucato and Collington expertly debunk the myth that consultancies always add value to the economy. With a wealth of original research, they argue brilliantly for investment and collective intelligence within all organizations and communities, and for a new system in which public and private sectors work innovatively for the common good. We must recalibrate the role of consultants and rebuild economies and governments that are fit for purpose.
argue brilliantly for investment and collective intelligence within all organizations and communities, and for a new system in which public and private sectors work innovatively for the common good. We must recalibrate the role of consultants and rebuild economies and governments that are fit for purpose.
BIG CON 2023 ARTICLES, REVIEWS ETC
irishtimes.com 3-3-2023 The Big Con: not so much an argument as an attack on consulting industry – Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington criticise an industry they present as a confidence trick whereby states and other actors outsource decision-making – by Paschal Donohoe
thenextrecession 1-3-202 The Big Con – review
…”…Despite the evidence, the management consultancy business continues to grow. In the UK, ministers have even dropped controls on spending on consultants, removing restrictions that required central authorisation if contracts with groups such as Deloitte, McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group lasted more than nine months or exceeded £600,000.
They are everywhere: in the US, AT&T (to pluck a random company) spent $500m on them in just five years, while the British state will soon be spending more on management consultants than on upgrading its nuclear weapons.
What’s the answer? Mazzucato and Collington reckon “Instead of wasting billions on external consultancies that stand to benefit from the hollowing out of Whitehall, governments should invest internally in creating capable organisations that foster learning and are empowered to take risks.” Whatever that means. The authors do not rule out consultants it seems. “Of course, departments should also work with other organisations and people that can help them achieve their democratic mandates – but this advice should come from the sidelines, provided by people with genuine expertise and experience.” Again, I am not sure what that means.
Surely, the solution comes in ending outsourcing and consultants and instead rely on the workers in firms and governments to improve outcomes. But that would mean giving workers democratic control of production and services and ending the autocracy of grotesquely overpaid chief executives and shareholder power. With workers control of the workplace, integrated into a plan for investment, training and employment, real improvements could be made – with hundreds of billions saved and used more effectively.”
thetimes.co.uk 27-2-2023 There’s hope yet for young souls lost to consultancy – by Susie Goldsbrough
Last week was a bad time to be a management consultant. The publication of The Big Con by the UCL economists Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington triggered a media blast against the consultancy sector for sucking the self-reliance and innovation out of business and government. Like a malignant money-making octopus.
It has certainly suckered enough of my friends. When I left uni in 2019, a big wodge of the smartest people headed into the arms of consultancies, which welcomed them like sadistic lovers. The working hours that would make a Victorian factory child wince, the whopping salaries, the extraordinarily decadent office parties and holidays — anyone under 30 with friends in the industry will be familiar with the specific cocktail of torture and bribery that…
theguardian.com 16-2-2023 The Big Con by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington review – how consultancy firms cash in From Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy to Britain’s Covid contracts, the private firms taking over public life – by Hettie O’Brien
When Puerto Rico started bankruptcy proceedings in 2016, the US island territory became McKinsey’s newest client. The company was hired to advise a federally appointed oversight board and, according to a report in New York magazine, set about creating an “aspirational vision” for Puerto Rico, appointing a 31-year-old Harvard graduate as the project’s senior full-time consultant. A 2016 Columbia graduate assisted with financial calculations and job cuts (euphemistically termed “rightsizing measures”), and a recent Yale graduate handled hurricane damage assessment. Ultimately, McKinsey advised on a “schema” for the island’s ailing economy that included privatising public enterprises and removing labour protections.
The firm’s work in Puerto Rico is one of many stories in Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington’s new book, a brisk and approachable guide to the consulting industry and its discontents. Management consultants are frequently used by corporate executives or governments to provide a veneer of authority – and a convenient scapegoat – for controversial “reforms”. Their role in public life has increased: as one Conservative minister put it in 2020, Whitehall has been “infantilised” by its reliance on management consultants. Mazzucato and Collington’s argument is an elaboration of this point. They claim that consultancies have weakened businesses and hollowed out state capacity. “The more governments and businesses outsource,” they write, “the less they know how to do.”
This is particularly clear in Britain, which is the second largest market for consultants globally after the US. Take Covid contracts. Rather than approaching the test-and-trace programme as an opportunity for the public sector, ministers and civil servants relied on a familiar roll call of consultancy firms. At one point, the equivalent of more than £1m a day was spent on consultants; some senior advisers billed more than £6,000 for a single day’s work.
Mazzucatto and Collington’s book cites many journalistic reports and academic studies, giving the occasional impression of a literature review. Its most compelling sections are interviews conducted with consultants themselves. Of working on the UK government’s Covid response, one said: “It just seemed like every project had loads of wandering Deloitte people … the sheer volume of them that were around created the situation of these zombie emails just arriving all the time … taking our attention away from actual work.”
What’s both infuriating and amusing is the assumption that fresh-faced consultants airlifted in from one of the big firms know better than workers on the office floor or staff in the NHS, when they often seem to know very little. The industry works on the basis that “knowledge can be purchased, as if off a shelf”, Mazzucato and Collington write, and its solutions can appear comically simplistic. The book features a copy of the Boston Consulting Group’s “growth-share matrix”, a diagram whose cutout silhouettes of a cow, a star, a dog and a question mark were intended to help businesses separate profitable ventures from dead weight. Introduced in 1970, the diagram was widely taught in business schools in the decades that followed. It wouldn’t look out of place in a children’s book.
So why do governments keep falling for it? As the title of this book implies, consulting is, at least in part, a confidence trick. A consultant’s job is to convince anxious customers that they have the answers, whether or not that’s true: “Clients often interpret nervousness as a lack of conviction about a particular recommendation,” explains one textbook on the matter. The con feeds off itself, Mazzucato and Collington suggest: the bigger such companies grow, the weaker governments become, and the more likely they are to look to the consulting industry to rescue them.
But the broader answer requires taking a longer view. Since the 1980s, politicians have sought to make the public sector function more like a business, using mechanisms such as performance-related pay and cost-benefit analyses to drive private sector values into the public realm. As Michael Heseltine put it one year after Margaret Thatcher took power: “The management ethos must run right through our national life – private and public companies, civil service, nationalised industries, local government, the National Health Service.” In falling for this narrative, we’ve all been conned.
ft.com 14-2-2023 Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington’s The Big Con — the case against consultancies – review – The Henry Mance Interview –
“It would be foolish to blame consultancies for all the problems that advanced capitalism has created,” state Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington in their conclusion. Nevertheless, the authors of The Big Con blame consultancies for an awful lot, starting with: “The pristine PowerPoints, copy-and-pasted formulas for strategy and often ineffective tools that many consultancies employ.”
The book’s chatty subtitle — How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies — encapsulates the charge sheet. The focus is almost entirely on the UK, a pioneer of outsourcing by the public sector to private consultants, but the same issues arise elsewhere.
In the end the finger is pointed not at consultancies at all but rather at successive UK governments. For what the authors — a prominent academic economist famous for advocating state-led “missions” or “moonshots” and a PhD student — recommend is strengthening the civil service, rebuilding internal capacity within government, improving the process of contracting and evaluation of outsourced outcomes, and requiring consultancies to disclose conflicts of interest when they bid for public sector work.
The outsourcing of much government activity to the private sector began with Margaret Thatcher, prime minister 1979-90, alongside the privatisations of public corporations. The habit continued under Tony Blair’s Labour government and the Third Way centrism in the late 1990s and early 21st century. Indeed it expanded as the Conservatives’ Private Finance Initiative proved a handy means for New Labour to spend more on projects such as new school and hospital builds by pushing the (higher) costs to future years and off the current year’s budget. Mazzucato and Collington blame the 1992 book Reinventing Government by US consultants David Osborne and Ted Gaebler for calling for a government that “steers more, rows less,” arguing that a government incapable of rowing can’t steer either.
The Big Con jumps between discussing any government use of consultants at all and public service outsourcing in particular, and draws heavily on media stories about money-wasting and scandal. But there is a significant debate to be had about where and how to draw the boundary between state and private activity — which is the real theme of this book although it is never made very clear.
We wouldn’t want the government to manufacture its own stationery rather than buy it, nor hospitals to make their own wound dressings. Similarly with payroll services or couriers — although they were largely in-house in private and public sector alike until the 1980s. But what about IT systems? Or cataract surgery? Outsourcing the former seems not to have gone well in general, given the number of prominent, costly IT failures, while technological advance has made it easy and efficient for cataract operations to be contracted out to specialist private providers.
The book is a polemic, blaming the failures of outsourcing, IT included, on incompetence — or worse — on the part of the consultancies. It principally has in its sights the three big strategic consultancies (Bain, BCG and McKinsey) and the four big accountancy firms (Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG, and PwC). It acknowledges that there is a place for some consultants with specialist knowledge, while also taking a swipe at some smaller firms en passant. There have certainly been plenty of news stories about eye-wateringly large payments to the big seven, egregious delivery failures, and fines for various regulatory breaches.
What do these many sorry tales tell us about the consultancy business? The economics of asymmetric information — whereby the hapless official can never know as much as the smarty-pants consultancy — and the principal-agent problem of conflicting interests (neither idea is cited in the book) would argue for outsourcing only activities that can be monitored.
Nobel laureate Oliver Hart and his co-authors argued in 1997, for instance, against privatising prisons, due to the perverse effects of the profit motive and the contracting authority’s inability to monitor the quality of the service provided. Apply this to NHS hospitals, and it would point to outsourcing routine procedures such as those cataract operations but not cleaning hospitals. After all, bugs suchs as MRSA are invisible unless you’re especially looking for them.
Improving the process of procurement, contracting and evaluation is surely a no-brainer
Similarly, IT systems should be kept in house because nobody can tell how effectively they operate until they are up and running, and even then problems might take years to come to light. What can’t be easily monitored needs to be done by those whose primary motivation is something other than cutting costs and maximising profits — public service, for example.
Sometimes the sensible boundary between public and private will shift because of technology. This was the case with payroll outsourcing for example: advances in computers and software made it genuinely more efficient to use external suppliers. And people generally will spot if they are getting the wrong amount of pay. A similar debate could be had about what else the NHS could sensibly outsource to specialist providers or pharmacies, given the many advances in medical procedures over the decades, although it is obviously too politically polarising to happen.
Where The Big Con is spot on is in noting how hard it is to wind the clock back: “Often the capabilities for managing the delivery of a service in-house would be completely lost after they had been outsourced, and so the costs of re-insourcing were very great.” Thus the same names keep winning new government contracts despite the various scandals. Among the book’s recommendations, those concerning rebuilding those capabilities in the public sector look rather forlorn as this would involve significant cost and time in hiring and rebuilding skills and knowhow.
But improving the process of procurement, contracting and evaluation is surely a no-brainer. A re-evaluation of the PFI by the Treasury in 2004 led to more thorough assessment of the costs and risks of projects, and a reduction in the number of projects and amounts of money involved. By contrast, government spending on consultants and outsourced services has continued to rise (to about £300bn a year or a third of government spending), particularly under the twin burden of pandemic response and Brexit on the public sector. We will never know how bad that is — if there’s a con, how big is it? — without rebuilding this particular bit of public sector capability.
ft.com 16-1-2023 Industrial strategy demands a new deal with the private sector – Governments must approach these partnerships as an opportunity to maximise public value – by Mariana Mazzucato
Last month, Biden’s chief economic adviser compared the scale of investment and ambition behind the new US industrial strategy to the Apollo space programme. But this ambition will only be realised if the strategy is designed to foster a new kind of economic growth. Crucial to this are the conditions that companies must meet to receive public funds.
If they are to “build back better” — rather than returning to the crisis-ridden status quo — growth must be inclusive and sustainable. To achieve this, governments need to strike a new deal with the private sector, raising the bar on what to expect in return for public funding. This requires approaching these partnerships as an opportunity to maximise public value — to share the rewards as well as the risks of investing in innovation and growth.
There are four types of conditions that governments should consider attaching to procurement, grants, loans and tax incentives.
Where affordable and equitable access is a policy priority, products and services with public funding should be priced accordingly. For example, the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, developed with the help of government investments in R&D, manufacturing, and advance sales, included provisions to keep prices low, limit profits during Covid and ensure knowledge-sharing for public health. This contrasts with the trend of monopoly pricing in the pharmaceutical industry and strategic patenting to block competitors.
Conditions can also shape the goals — or “missions” — behind investment and impose standards on companies. Decarbonising existing industries and expanding green innovation and growth is a priority. To tackle the climate crisis we need entrepreneurial states to shape and create markets. In the US, clean energy is a major focus of recent investments while EU recovery funds are oriented towards climate and digital inclusion goals.
Achieving these goals requires more than just investing in specific green technologies or industries. Conditions associated with a just green transition should cut across all industrial strategy investments: for example, requiring new manufacturing capacity to minimise carbon emissions and create jobs that meet labour standards.
In addition, receipt of public funds should be conditional on sharing a proportion of royalties, equity or intellectual property with the government. This would enable the state to take a portfolio approach to investments, knowing some will succeed and some fail. If the US government had acquired shares in Tesla in exchange for its early-stage funding of $465mn, this revenue could have been reinvested in other companies aligned with green transition goals.
Last, governments can prompt companies to channel their own investments into productive activities. Biden’s Chips and Science Act, which seeks to boost US semiconductor innovation and manufacturing, includes “guardrail” provisions that prohibit funds from being used for share buybacks. It does not yet, however, prohibit companies that receive chips act funding from engaging in such buybacks — a loophole that has led to calls for tougher rules.
The companies that lobbied for the act have previously spent billions on share buybacks — Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, and Google collectively spent $633bn on them between 2011 and 2020, for instance. Stringent conditions could require future profits be reinvested into research and development and workforce training.
Industrial strategy in many countries is still being shaped. The chips act, in particular, offers an immediate opportunity to impose conditions. Its existing “guardrail” requirements are a good starting point. But whether this act is a catalyst for green and inclusive growth — and not “corporate welfare” — will depend on the terms set in funding notices and contracts.
Without conditions, the public money flowing into industrial strategies will dissipate into company and shareholder profits with only marginal public gain. Getting these investments right should be a priority for governments everywhere.”
ft.com 12-2-2023 Mariana Mazzucato: ‘The McKinseys and the Deloittes have no expertise in the areas that they’re advising in’
Mariana Mazzucato deutsch – updates 11-2023
zeit.de 11-2019 “Politik braucht eine Mission” – Zeit-Interview mit Mariana Mazzucato
NEU im April 2023
campus.de 4-2023 Die große Consulting-Show: Wie die Beratungsbranche unsere Unternehmen schwächt, den Staat unterwandert und die Wirtschaft vereinnahmt Kindle Edition – by Mariana Mazzucato , Rosie H. Collington , Ursel Schäfer (Übersetzer)
Es gab Zeiten, da haben Berater einfach Firmen beraten, heute steuern sie in vielen Ländern die Regierungsgeschäfte und beeinflussen die Gesetzgebung. Das Outsourcing von staatlichen Aufgaben hat exorbitant zugenommen, Unsummen an Steuergeldern fließen in die Consulting-Industrie. Ein undurchschaubares System von Verträgen ist entstanden und macht die Frage nach Verantwortlichkeiten kompliziert. Dies ist eine sehr gefährliche Entwicklung, sagt Starökonomin Mariana Mazzucato: Je mehr der Staat an Ressourcen und Wissen verliert, umso mehr verlernt er, seine eigenen Aufgaben zu erfüllen. Gemeinsam mit Rosie Collington enthüllt sie das ganze Ausmaß der Machtverschiebung, legt die Abhängigkeiten offen und zeigt, wie der öffentliche Sektor und damit unsere Demokratie wieder gestärkt werden können.
> Industriepolitik, Staat, Innovationen, Wirtschaftswissenschaft
project-syndicate.org 3-2023 Berater und die Krise des Kapitalismus – by Mariana Mazzucato, Rosie Collington
In den letzten Jahren hat sich McKinsey & Company einen Namen gemacht – aber aus den falschen Gründen. Als eines der „Großen Drei“-Beratungsunternehmen ist seine Arbeit für große Unternehmen und Regierungen zunehmend zu einer Quelle von Skandalen und Intrigen auf der ganzen Welt geworden.
In den Vereinigten Staaten hat McKinsey zum Beispiel zugestimmt, fast 600 Mio. Dollar für seine Rolle bei der tödlichen Opioid-Epidemie zu zahlen, nachdem es Purdue Pharma beraten haben soll, wie man den Verkauf des Schmerzmittels OxyContin „ankurbeln“ kann. In Australien wurde die Arbeit des Unternehmens an der nationalen Netto-Null-Strategie der vorherigen Regierung als schamloser Versuch kritisiert, die fossile Brennstoffindustrie des Landes zu schützen. Und in Puerto Rico fand eine Untersuchung der New York Timesheraus, dass die Investment-Tochtergesellschaft von McKinsey, MIO Partners, so eingesetzt wurde, dass sie von genau denselben Schulden profitierten, bei deren Umstrukturierung ihre Berater halfen.
Diese Liste ließe sich endlos fortsetzen. Aber wie wir in unserem neuen Buch The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps our Economies zeigen, sind solche Skandale nur die Spitze des Eisbergs. Zwar gibt es in jedem Unternehmen ein paar schwarze Schafe, doch das eigentliche Problem liegt im zugrunde liegenden Geschäftsmodell der Beratungsbranche.
Im Jahr 2021 wurde der weltweite Markt für Beratungsdienstleistungen auf 700-900 Mrd. Dollar geschätzt. Doch trotz der wachsenden Rolle der Branche im wirtschaftlichen und politischen Leben werden ihre Aktivitäten kaum als das angesehen, was sie sind: Symptome für tiefere strukturelle Probleme des heutigen Kapitalismus. Die Beratungsbranche mag nicht gänzlich für die Finanzialisierung der Wirtschaft, die Kurzsichtigkeit der Unternehmen oder die Aushöhlung des öffentlichen Sektors verantwortlich sein, aber sie lebt gut davon. In der gesamten Geschichte des modernen Kapitalismus war die Big Con (wie wir die Branche nennen) bei jeder neuen Welle der Dysfunktion dabei.
In der Regierung förderten große Beratungsunternehmen den Vorstoß in Richtung Privatisierung, Managementreform, private Finanzierung, Outsourcing, Digitalisierung und Sparmaßnahmen und profitierten massiv davon. In der Wirtschaft trugen sie dazu bei, neue Modelle der Unternehmensführung zu etablieren, von der Verbreitung der Kostenrechnung und multidivisionaler Unternehmen in den Jahrzehnten nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg bis hin zum Aufstieg des King Shareholder bei der Festlegung von Prioritäten und der Zuweisung von Ressourcen.
Heute verspricht die Beratungsbranche, genau die Probleme umzukehren, zu deren Entstehung sie beigetragen hat – daher der Boom bei neuen Verträgen zur Beratung im Bereich „Umwelt, Soziales und Unternehmensführung“ (ESG). Es überrascht nicht, dass dieser neue Geschäftszweig mit allen möglichen Interessenkonflikten einhergeht. So hat McKinsey zum Beispiel mindestens 43 der 100 größten Umweltverschmutzer beraten.
Die Rolle der Beratungsfirmen in der COVID-19-Krise war besonders aufschlussreich. In den ersten beiden Jahren der Pandemie gaben die Regierungen enorme Summen für Beratungsverträge aus, doch die Ergebnisse waren bestenfalls zweifelhaft und schlimmstenfalls schädlich. In Frankreich waren die Beraterfirmen stark in die Impfkampagne des Landes involviert. Doch das französische Programm war alles andere als ein Musterbeispiel für Effizienz, sondern wurde weithin als Katastrophe angesehen. Bis Anfang Januar 2021 waren gerade einmal 5.000 Dosen verabreicht worden, verglichen mit 316.000 in Deutschland und 139.000 in Spanien (alle drei Länder begannen ihre Programme etwa zur gleichen Zeit).
Manchmal engagieren Regierungen Berater, um Lücken in ihren eigenen Kapazitäten zu schließen. Leider ist die Vergabe von weitreichenden, lukrativen Aufträgen an Beraterfirmen zum Standard geworden, selbst in Bereichen, die eigentlich in den Zuständigkeitsbereich der Regierung fallen sollten. So beklagte ein britischer konservativer Abgeordneter im Jahr 2020, dass Beamten routinemäßig „die Möglichkeit genommen wird, an einigen der anspruchsvollsten, erfüllendsten und knackigsten Themen zu arbeiten“, und dass die „inakzeptable“ Abhängigkeit von privaten Beratern den öffentlichen Dienst infantilisiert.
Wenn alles ausgelagert wird, können die Behörden nicht die internen Fähigkeiten und Kenntnisse entwickeln, die zur Bewältigung neuer Herausforderungen erforderlich sind. Dies sollte uns alle beunruhigen. Epidemiologen warnen, dass die nächste globale Pandemie eine Frage des „Wann“ und nicht des „Ob“ ist. Wir müssen dringend in die Fähigkeit von Regierungen und Gesundheitsbehörden investieren, neue Ausbrüche zu erkennen und einzudämmen, bevor sie sich ausbreiten können.
Schließlich sollte man den großen Beratungsfirmen nicht zutrauen, dass sie das Fachwissen haben, für das sie angeheuert wurden. Wie die New York Times unter Berufung auf einen Forscher des französischen Nationalen Zentrums für wissenschaftliche Forschung feststellte, neigten die Beraterfirmen, die hinter der chaotischen Einführung von Impfstoffen in Frankreich standen, dazu, „Betriebsmodelle aus anderen Branchen zu importieren, die im Gesundheitswesen nicht immer effektiv waren“.
Die zunehmende Abhängigkeit von großen Beratungsunternehmen mit extraktiven Geschäftsmodellen hemmt die Innovation und die staatlichen Kapazitäten, untergräbt die demokratische Rechenschaftspflicht und verschleiert die Auswirkungen von politischen und unternehmerischen Maßnahmen. Im Zeitalter des Klimazusammenbruchs sind diese Folgen existenziell geworden. Wir alle zahlen den Preis, wenn öffentliche Gelder und andere Ressourcen verschwendet werden und wenn Entscheidungen in Regierung und Wirtschaft ungestraft und mit wenig Transparenz getroffen werden.
Erschwerend kommt hinzu, dass intelligente junge Fachkräfte mit guten Absichten zunehmend durch das Versprechen einer zielgerichteten (und besser bezahlten) Arbeit in der Beratungsbranche vom öffentlichen Dienst weggelockt werden. (Obwohl es glücklicherweise Anzeichen dafür gibt, dass viele junge Berater von diesem Sektor desillusioniert sind).
Der Kampf gegen jede Sucht beginnt damit, dass man sich das Problem eingesteht. Nur dann können wir unsere Abhängigkeit verringern. In einer Zeit, in der mehr Menschen als je zuvor ökonomische Orthodoxien in Frage stellen und nach Alternativen suchen, kann das Aufdecken der Rolle der Big Con in der heutigen Wirtschaft den Weg zu Lösungen weisen. Um eine besser funktionierende Wirtschaft aufzubauen, müssen wir in die Kapazitäten und das Know-how des Staates investieren, den öffentlichen Sektor wieder mit öffentlichen Aufgaben betrauen und das System von kostspieligen, unnötigen Vermittlungsdiensten der Beratungsindustrie befreien.
Überall auf der Welt werden sich die Regierungen der Gefahren bewusst, die sich aus dem übermäßigen Vertrauen in Beratungsunternehmen ergeben – und aus der Form des Kapitalismus, zu deren Entstehung sie beigetragen haben. Reformer entwickeln innovative neue Governance-Modelle, von internen Beratungsunternehmen des öffentlichen Sektors bis hin zu politischen „Labors“ und lokalen, gemeinschaftsorientierten Beschaffungsprogrammen.
Um unsere Volkswirtschaften im öffentlichen Interesse umzugestalten, müssen wir unser Denken und Reden über die Rolle des Staates ändern. Wir müssen aufhören, den Staat nur als Marktretter und Risikominderer zu sehen, und ihn als entscheidenden wirtschaftlichen Akteur anerkennen. Private Organisationen und Einzelpersonen mit echten Kenntnissen und Fähigkeiten können immer noch wertvolle Ratgeber sein. Sie sollten jedoch in transparenter Weise von der Seitenlinie aus beraten und „konsultieren“, anstatt dass ihnen die Verantwortung übertragen wird und sie unabhängig von ihrer Leistung bezahlt werden.
Rezensionen, Interviews
faz/msn.de 9-1-2023 Mariana Mazzucato – Habecks schlechte Ratgeberin – von Rainer Hank
Der Staat muss der Wirtschaft die Richtung weisen. Das ist die zentrale Botschaft der italoamerikanischen Ökonomin Mariana Mazzucato. Im Kampf gegen die Herausforderungen des 21. Jahrhunderts, vor allem gegen den Klimawandel, sei der Markt überfordert, sagt sie. Den Unternehmen fehlten der gute Wille, die richtigen Anreize und die Übersicht, das dringend Gebotene zu unternehmen. Deshalb müsse der Staat ran. Er soll sich vom Nachtwächterstaat, der lediglich den Rahmen setzt, zum „unternehmerischen Staat“ häuten, der gesellschaftliche Werte generiert, aktiv in Märkte eingreift und privatwirtschaftliche Entscheidungen lenkt.
Mit dieser Mission im Gepäck tourt Mariana Mazzucato seit geraumer Zeit um die Welt, berät Regierungen und kann sich vor Anfragen und Aufträgen nicht mehr retten. Ihre Interviews gibt sie im Stakkato-Tempo, schließlich wartet der nächste Kunde schon. Eine erfolgreiche Privatunternehmerin ist Frau Mazzucato auf jeden Fall. Ihre Ressourcenbasis erhält sie vom staatlichen University College in London. Wenn man so will, ist sie selbst das beste Beispiel des unternehmerischen Staates. Als Wissenschaftskommunikatorin neuen Typs gleicht sie den umtriebigen deutschen Popularisierern Maja Göpel und Richard David Precht. Sie alle wollen sich nicht damit begnügen, die Welt zu erkennen und zu beschreiben, sondern leben von der Überzeugung, sie verändern zu müssen, selbstredend zum Besseren. Ihr Lebensraum ist nicht der Elfenbeinturm, sondern der TED-Talk…”…
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nzz.ch 10-2022 «Wir haben sehr träge Staatsapparate, die nicht in die eigenen Köpfe investieren, sondern alles an McKinsey auslagern» -Sie berät Regierungen weltweit: Die Ökonomin Mariana Mazzucato plädiert für eine «mission economy»: Der Staat soll bei Innovationen die Richtung vorgeben. Dem Privatsektor wirft sie vor, nur auf kurzfristige Gewinne aus zu sein.
handelsblatt.com 10- 2022 Die Krise bietet die Chance, eine alternative Wirtschaftspolitik zu entwerfen – Progressive Politiker sollten eine Agenda für inklusives und nachhaltiges Wachstum formulieren. Damit die erfolgreich ist, sind fünf Prinzipien wichtig, meint Mariana Mazzucato
Da große Teile der Welt mit unvermeidbaren Herausforderungen in den Bereichen Gesundheit, Energie, Lebenshaltungskosten und Klima konfrontiert sind, haben progressive Politiker nun die Gelegenheit, eine echte Alternative zur herkömmlichen Wirtschaftspolitik zu formulieren. Dies erfordert eine mutige und in sich schlüssige Vision, wie sich ein inklusives und nachhaltiges Wachstum erreichen lässt. Unglücklicherweise hat das Fehlen einer solchen mutigen und klaren progressiven Politik den Rechtsextremen ermöglicht, überall in Europa an Boden zu gewinnen – nicht zuletzt in Italien, wo Giorgia Melonis postfaschistisches Bündnis regieren wird…”…
zeit.de/kultur 5-2021 Zeit-Interview: “Der Staat muss ganze Märkte neu erschaffen” meint Mariana Mazzucato-staat-eingreifen-markt-mission-buchveroeffentlichung
wirtschaftsdienst.eu 10-2020 Industriestrategie der nächsten Generation für Deutschland– Von Rainer Kattel, Mariana Mazzucato, Keno Haverkamp, Josh Ryan-Collins
…”…Allerdings gibt es in der deutschen Industrielandschaft erhebliche unausgelastete Ressourcen. Ein Thema, das in der wissenschaftlichen Debatte zunehmend Beachtung findet, ist die Rolle von Zentralbanken und Finanzregulatoren bei der Bewältigung klimabedingter Finanzrisiken (Campiglio et al., 2018). Seit der globalen Finanzkrise von 2008 haben die Zentralbanken zunehmend ein breiteres Spektrum „unkonventioneller“ Maßnahmen eingesetzt, darunter quantitative Lockerung und verschiedene andere kurz- und längerfristige Liquiditätsprogramme zur Stimulierung der Wirtschaft. Die Ausweitung der Zentralbankinterventionen in die Märkte bietet eine ausgezeichnete Gelegenheit, die Finanzströme strategischer auf umweltfreundlichere, kohlenstofffreie Alternativen umzulenken. Trotz dieses großen Potenzials deuten Untersuchungen darauf hin, dass die Käufe von Unternehmensanleihen durch die Europäische Zentralbank (EZB) die Investitionsentscheidungen der Finanzmärkte widerspiegeln und dadurch bisher vor allem große kohlenstoffintensive Unternehmen begünstigt haben (Jourdan und Kalinowski, 2019; Matikainen, Campiglio und Zenghelis, 2017). Um diese unerwünschte Konsequenz zu verhindern, sollten die Zentralbanken entweder die Käufe im Rahmen der quantitativen Lockerung neu kalibrieren, um kohlenstoffintensive Finanzanlagen auszuschließen, oder parallel dazu ein grünes quantitatives Lockerungsprogramm durchführen, um den Effekt abzuschwächen.
In der Eurozone führen die Zentralbanken Belgiens, Finnlands, Frankreichs, Deutschlands, Italiens und Spaniens im Auftrag der EZB Anleihekäufe durch. Dies wird von jeder Nationalbank in ihrem jeweiligen Tätigkeitsbereich durchgeführt. Das heißt, die Deutsche Bundesbank kauft beispielsweise Anleihen von Unternehmen in Deutschland und den Niederlanden, die Banque de France kauft Anleihen von französischen Unternehmen und so weiter. Während die Käufe in die Bilanz der jeweiligen Nationalbank eingehen, obliegt die Koordination der EZB. Infolgedessen werden etwaige finanzielle Gewinne oder Verluste nach dem Kapitalschlüssel der EZB auf alle Nationalbanken des Eurosystems verteilt. Untersuchungen haben ergeben, dass der Großteil der Anleihekäufe von Unternehmen getätigt wird, die in den kohlenstoffintensivsten Sektoren tätig sind: Gewinnung und Verteilung fossiler Energieträger, Automobilherstellung und -ausrüstung sowie Versorgungsunternehmen (Jourdan und Kalinowski, 2019).
Da die Bundesbank das Programm zur quantitativen Lockerung jedoch im Auftrag der EZB durchführt, ist die faktische Macht der Bundesbank relativ gering. Dennoch ist der Einfluss Deutschlands auf die EZB erheblich. Zumindest erscheint es angemessen, dass die Bundesbank ihre Kriterien für den Erwerb von Vermögenswerten aktiv überprüft, damit klimabedingte Finanzrisiken angemessen in ihre Programme zum Erwerb von Sicherheiten und Vermögenswerten integriert sind (Chenet, Ryan-Collins und van Lerven, 2019).
Eine weitere nicht ausgeschöpfte Finanzierungsquelle, die sowohl Lebensstile als auch die industrielle Produktion verändert, ist die Beschaffung. Die öffentliche Hand in der EU gibt jedes Jahr rund 2 Billionen Euro für diese Anschaffungen aus, was 14 % des BIP entspricht; allein Deutschland gibt bis zu 500 Mrd. Euro für Beschaffungen aus. Angesichts dieser enormen Kaufkraft birgt eine grüne oder nachhaltige Beschaffung ein großes Potenzial zur Dekarbonisierung der Wirtschaft. Im Gegensatz zu Emissionshandelssystemen, deren Preise derzeit zu niedrig sind, um einen kohlenstoffarmen Übergang zu bewirken, bietet die grüne Beschaffung einen bedeutenden und unmittelbaren Weg in die Zukunft (Chiappinelli und Zipperer, 2017). Als positiver Spillover-Effekt hat die grüne Beschaffung das Potenzial, die Entwicklung von Leitmärkten für klimafreundliche Technologien anzustoßen und Anreize für grüne Innovationen zu schaffen.
Das deutsche Vergaberecht ermöglicht es der öffentlichen Hand, strategische Ziele, wie z. B. Umweltanforderungen, in die Vergabekriterien des Bieterverfahrens einzubeziehen. Wie Untersuchungen zeigen, enthielten jedoch nur 2,4 % aller öffentlichen Aufträge, die 2015 in Deutschland vergeben wurden, Umweltkriterien für das öffentliche Beschaffungswesen. Während Deutschland auf Bundesebene ehrgeizige Ziele für die Dekarbonisierung formuliert hat, scheint dies auf der Ebene der Bundesländer und Kommunen nicht erreicht zu werden, wo eine Reihe von Herausforderungen und Hindernisse für eine umweltfreundliche Beschaffungspraxis bestehen.
Die deutsche Politik sollte die einzigartige Gelegenheit, die durch die globale Pandemie geschaffen wurde, für weitere institutionelle und politische Innovationen für gezieltere Investitionen sowohl des öffentlichen als auch des privaten Sektors nutzen. Um dies zu erreichen, braucht Deutschland ein neues wirtschaftspolitisches Modell, das ausdrücklich darauf abzielt, die Märkte für ein nachhaltigeres und gerechteres Wachstum zu gestalten. Ein marktgestaltender Politikrahmen setzt auf Komplementaritäten und Ausgewogenheit zwischen diffusionsorientierten Politiken und dem Fokus auf die Lösung spezifischer sozioökonomischer Herausforderungen (Missionen). Er muss den Innovationsauftrag auch auf die Finanzregulierung, das Beschaffungswesen und allgemeinere wirtschaftspolitische Institutionen wie Zentralbanken übertragen…”…