Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

I want Mariana Mazzucato to take over all governments.

Here she builds further upon on her vision that governments should take on more risk, and steer markets and the private sector into directions that serve the common good, and NOT simply exist to fix market mistakes.

She lists the many ways our economies are broken today, and advocates that we need to restructure governments around more mission-oriented thinking. The prime example of a big mission-oriented government-led success is the decade-long quest to reach the moon. Despite being expensive, the quest united the people and fed many technological innovative offspring projects that brought back the original investments and more.

What differentiates the race to the moon with today's very long list of goals (fighting climate change, fighting inequality, end poverty...) is that the moon was an easy problem only requiring a technological solution. Today's goals (see UN Sustainable Development Goals) are ‘wicked', they involve everyone on earth, are controlled by a complex network of organizations, and potentially even have parties and forces directly opposing those goals. Which scares me. But apparently not Mariana Mazzucato. Hence the beginning of my review.