Mazzucato says it will need “involving citizens in solving societal challenges and creating wide civic excitement about the power of collective innovation”. Wading through this jargon, she seems to be saying that policy makers, researchers (like herself) and businesses will get together and listen to ‘citizens’ somehow and out of this will come a widely approved set of ‘missions’ for innovation.
Italian-American economist, Mariana Mazzucato, who works and resides in London, has become a big name in what we might call ‘centre-left’ or even in mainstream economic and political circles. She has a new book out, Mission Economy: a moonshot guide to changing capitalism.
Mazzucato was briefly an economic adviser to the UK Labour Party under Corbyn and McDonnell; she apparently “has the ear” of radical Congress representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; she advised Democratic presidential hopeful, Senator Elizabeth Warren and also Scottish Nationalist leader Nicola Sturgeon. She was even accorded the title of “the world’s scariest economist” because her ideas were apparently really shaking up things among the great and good. According to the London Times newspaper, “admired by Bill Gates, consulted by governments, Mariana Mazzucato is the expert others argue with at their peril”.
However, whereas she appeared to start out as adviser to the left of the political spectrum…
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