Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

Abstract

Cometh the hour, cometh … Mariana Mazzucato. Although she could not have anticipated the COVID-19 global pandemic, even less so the associated abandonment by governments of previously revered debt and deficit shibboleths, Professor Mazzucato’s new book on transformative mission-led research and innovation Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism is a contribution for its time. For decades, those advocating interventionist approaches to innovation and industry policy have felt obliged to do so within the restrictive doctrinal framework of neoclassical economics, whose static equilibrium model confines the role of government to addressing ‘market failure’, or in other words removing impediments to the operation of the market conceived in this abstract model. As Mazzucato recognizes, the model is static because it excludes the role of technological change and innovation, and characterized by equilibrium because it assumes all resources of labour and capital are fully employed, or would be in a world...