Mariana Mazzucato Books

Modern capitalism has lost its sense of direction. Once a system animated by innovation and exploration, it has been overtaken by short-term financial thinking. Corporations chase quarterly profits; investors measure success in market values rather than productive outcomes. The tragedy is not only e...

From Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

The idea that the state should be entrepreneurial is often unsettling to those raised in the shadow of neoliberalism. Yet history shows that every major technological revolution—the internet, biotechnology, renewable energy—was born of public risk-taking. The state was not a passive fixer of market ...

From Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

To begin this exploration, I step back to the classical economists—Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx—because they understood that value was rooted in production. For Smith, value derived from labor that produced goods for exchange; for Ricardo, comparative advantage and productive labor struc...

From The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

The key rupture came with the rise of neoclassical economics in the late nineteenth century. The classical focus on labor and production was replaced by the notion of subjective utility—the idea that value resided not in production but in the pleasure or satisfaction derived by consumers. This shift...

From The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy