The book is ambitious in proposing important economic governmental interventions that are driven by social objectives. The author parallels the mission to land on the moon as a guiding structure that would create consensus and focus.

The work is great and ambitious but does have some problems. The book should include more to educate around problems that do not fit in a straightforward way with the moonshot model and what doss the model proposed leave as broader socio economic consequences.

Examples: wicked problems basically are “solved” around values which means we must accept that missions are deeply political value driven operations. Unintended consequences of a badly specified mission could be more damaging than simple negligence. Missions can have divisive consequences on society by virtue of their specificity. I would have wanted to have a more critical insight of how one can tell good missions from bad for example. ( )

This is a brilliant book which builds upon the work of Kate Rayworth. It is written in a manner that is readily understandable by a person, such as myself, with very little economics education.

I have no doubt as to the need for changes such as Mariana Mazzucato advocates. I have no doubt that, were people to read this book, most would agree with the premise: the only problem that I foresee is that our British political system is built to ensure that change is kept to the minimum. The two major parties are more interested in retaining the status quo than improving the lot of the general public and any change to their cosy partnership will take a protracted fight. ( )

I found this quite disappointing. Does not seem to add much to her previous body of work. This might be a good entry point for someone who is new to her arguments but for someone who has read the previous 2 books and her contributions to policy processes this does not add much ( )

Pure hot air. The author claims to be part of many governmental organisation advisory committees presumably offering the same kind of platitudes and inspirational cheer leading that we can save the world through government control. Despite the author's wishful thinking government decree is not a substitute for rule of law and culture of trust. ( )

We had it and we lost it. According to Mariana Mazzucato, the USA showed precisely how to energize and motivate an entire country and its economy in the 1960s. Today’s USA shows no signs whatsoever of that spirit. It is everyone for themselves, and public institutions have become liabilities instead of levers. Mazzucato’s The Mission Economy is a delightfully positive, thoroughly thought through, universal solution to what ails capitalism. It is an object lesson in solutions hiding in plain sight.

It was President John F. Kennedy who, fearing the USA was falling behind the USSR, suddenly pledged to land Americans on the moon before the end of the decade. He acknowledged this would be risky and expensive, but he knew in advance it would send the US economy in all kinds of new directions. Some 400,000 people worked on the project. It led not only to major advancements in information technology and computers, but even to management methods as companies found they needed to communicate freely with competitors and their own employees. The economy boomed. And men walked on the moon.

Today, Mazzucato says, we desperately need a mission like the moon landing to not only give the economy a focus, but also to solve major overhanging problems the country cannot address through individual or corporate action. It/they would leverage the intellects and creativity out there, take the country in bold new directions, improve productivity by inventing new processes, and also create whole new industries and markets along the way.

Basically, there is no downside to remaking the economy through missions of moon landing scale.

She gets right down to business; it’s one of the things that makes this book great. Usually, there is a long, hundred page history of the issue for those new to the planet, followed by a short, pie-in-the-sky conclusion that will not work. The Mission Economy dispenses quickly with the single story of the moon mission, and gets right into the mechanics of replicating that success in numerous fields such as climate change, healthcare, ending poverty and several others. It is a pleasure of positive vibes. From an economist, not a dreaming-in-Technicolor futurist. Make that a superstar economist.

Mazzucato uses government agencies (horror!) to manage various aspects of the missions she describes. Government agencies have the talent and the money to give the economy the boost it needs. They have the bench strength, the institutional memory and the network connections to coordinate major missions across numerous fields and sectors of the economy.

It has been government, after all, that continually funds risky bets, creating new industries where none existed, and bailing out companies as needed.

This, she says, reveals a large problem America didn’t use to have: the socialization of costs. In America, if a business fails, the government eats the loss. If it succeeds, it shares none of the profit. Profits are privatized, losses are socialized. If the government were to share in the success of its investments, it could invest more often and in bigger projects. Instead, the conversation is now always about budgets, interference in private affairs, and incompetence. And as always, freedom. Despite all the evidence to the contrary.

At the same time, business leaders rely massively on government aid. She points out that Tesla, the poster child for private industry innovation, got $465 million in loan guarantees to get itself launched, and its founder, Elon Musk, has since obtained $4.9 billion in public subsidies for his various companies. Musk is off and on now the richest person in the world. But the American government is not participating in his success. Mazzucato says “Instead of government going to the moon, it’s more as if in recent decades it has been taken for a ride.” She calls instead for the socialization of investment.

Since the Reagan-Thatcher era, government has become the problem, not the solution. But as succeeding administrations have slashed government budgets and outsourced more and more activity, the results have been dismal at best. The outsourcing has cost far more rather than saving any money. Government employees get paid less than private contractors, and private contractors also require a profit. Private enterprise cannot perform as effectively as government agencies. Going private means the achievements of government have fallen to essentially nothing.

Instead of building on the success of the moonshot to create a permanent, virtuous circle of talent in government agencies, the US has discouraged it, stripped it, crippled it, and then blamed it for not performing. Eloquently, Mazzucato says “a government that lacks imagination will find it more difficult to create public value.” An understatement visible to all who live in the country.

Another problem is capitalism itself. Mazzucato says there are four reasons capitalism has led to the crippling point: 1) the short-termism of the financial sector 2) financialization of business, 3) climate emergency, and 4) slow or absent governments. She says markets are focused on the next quarter, on investing in financial products not major new developments. Companies are all about pleasing shareholders with stock buybacks, a dead end investment of its funds instead of expanding its business. Only bold government could mobilize a moonshot in this choking atmosphere.

America is all about freedom from government. It should only be there to bail out markets when greed leads to a crash. It’s only there to correct market failures, but it should be about shaping markets and creating new ones, like an outer space industry in the 60s.

Instead, Americans must wait for rich individuals to start new businesses. The result is slow going: “Our lethargic transition pace, globally, is a lesson in what can happen if government leaves the market to sort out problems and abstains from assuming its entrepreneurial role in society,” she says.

This is of course, not news. She says John Maynard Keynes wrote of it in his “1936 magnum opus The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. There, he identified three major tasks to be undertaken in order to save capitalism from its own demise: ‘parting with liquidity’, ‘euthanizing the rentiers’ and ‘socializing investment’.”

Throughout the book, Mazzucato draws on her own rich and varied experience advising governments around the world. She has refined the concept into mission maps that lay out the approaches needed to tackle various moonshot scale problems. Because nothing is simple or straightforward. Relationships need to be defined and refined. The direction of communication, process and production is interconnected and needs to be reversible. Unintended consequences, side issues and peripheral developments all need to be accounted for, preferably in planning. It’s laid out clearly in her mission maps.

She doesn’t lack for ideas, either. Mazzucato has mission maps for climate change, plastics remediation, health care, poverty- everything government is not addressing, when it is really the only entity that can. A green new deal could employ millions while finally solving pollution issues. That is, if government stepped up to drive it. Because industry can’t.

The Mission Economy suffers from nothing. It demonstrates clear thinking, straightforward language, actionable points, roadmaps, and results where it has been tried. It is a lovely, uplifting and positive experience to read. Yes, we can tackle these intractable problems. And yes, we can actually thrive in doing so rather than suffer with austerity for doing nothing but destroy the government – the very agent that can lead these massive efforts. Mazzucato’s reputation for straightforward thinking and explanation of complex economic principles is fully on display in The Mission Economy.

“Mission-oriented thinking cannot be based on the status quo. The mission attitude is not about picking individual sectors to support but about identifying problems that can catalyse collaboration between many different sectors. It is not about handing out money to firms because they are small or because they are in need, but structuring policies that can crowd in different solutions (projects) by multiple types of organizations. It is not about fixing markets but creating markets. It is not about de-risking but sharing risks. It is not about picking winners but picking the willing. And it is not simply about setting the ‘rules of the game’ but about changing the game itself so that a new direction can foster change – change towards a green transition and/or the digitalization of a population.”

David Wineberg ( )