Travel Documents 124: Mission Economy
Genre: economics, nonfiction, social change, cultural change
The Dust Cover Copy
Capitalism is in crisis. The rich have gotten richer—the 1 percent, those with more than $1 million, own 44 percent of the world's wealth—while climate change is transforming—and in some cases wiping out—life on the planet. We are plagued by crises threatening our lives, and this situation is unsustainable. But how do we fix these problems decades in the making?
Mission Economy looks at the grand challenges facing us in a radically new way. Global warming, pollution, dementia, obesity, gun violence, mobility—these environmental, health, and social dilemmas are huge, complex, and have no simple solutions. Mariana Mazzucato argues we need to think bigger and mobilize our resources in a way that is as bold as inspirational as the moon landing—this time to the most ‘wicked’ social problems of our time.. We can only begin to find answers if we fundamentally restructure capitalism to make it inclusive, sustainable, and driven by innovation that tackles concrete problems from the digital divide, to health pandemics, to our polluted cities. That means changing government tools and culture, creating new markers of corporate governance, and ensuring that corporations, society, and the government coalesce to share a common goal.
We did it to go to the moon. We can do it again to fix our problems and improve the lives of every one of us. We simply can no longer afford not to.
The Scene
Discussion
This is one to read right now, it absolutely is. Let’s get my complaint out of the way early: like so many books in the genre of socio-economic critique, this book spends so much time telling us there is a problem that it takes ages to get to the part I picked it up for: the solutions. It’s easy to talk about problems. We all know there are problems. In a two-hundred and sixty-some page book, I’d say a hundred were spent telling us what isn’t working. A hundred were spent in high minded conceptual discussion along the lines of ‘governments must dream bigger!’ Yes, that’s very nice, thanks. So…how do we get them to do that?
The last sixty pages had most of the good stuff: nitty-gritty policy suggestions, ideas for solid public-private partnerships, and really worthwhile ideas on how we could get from where we are to somewhere better.
The overarching premise of this book is a powerful one: we need to change our social focus from ‘can we afford it and will it give us a profit tomorrow’ to ‘how do we complete the project in the most effective way?’ The author uses the American (and sometimes Russian to an extent) moon landing projects. Wars and the Great Depression, and some really amazing work in tech and medicine that was originally bankrolled by the government are also referenced as examples of Times When We Stopped Counting Cost And Did The Thing. And the general message of this book is just this: when we don’t count everything in terms of the profit it’ll make today, we do great things. Our biggest mistake is in saying ‘it’ll cost too much to fix the power grid’ instead of realizing that neglect will cost us billions in wildfire damage. In short, we need to refocus from a Profit Economy to a Mission Economy. The author states it thus: “[A mission-oriented economy] means asking what kind of markets we want, rather than what problem in the market needs to be fixed.”
Writing Style
I really like this premise and the research is spot on, but I feel the work could have been more powerful if more solid ways to go from Profit Economy to Mission Economy had been enumerated, and if the style had been less didactic. As it was, even positive-thinking me started reacting to statements like “We must create more effective interfaces with innovations across the whole of society; rethink how policies are designed; change how intellectual property regimes are governed; and use R& D to distribute intelligence across academia, government, business and civil society. This means restoring public purpose in policies so that they are aimed at creating tangible benefits for citizens and setting goals that matter to people–driven by public-interest considerations rather than profit,” with ‘uh…great. How?’ and statements like “Applying mission-oriented thinking in our times requires not just adaptation but also institutional innovations that create new markets and reshape the existing ones. And, importantly, it also requires citizen participation” made me say ‘uh…have you seen the government lately? How do we participate in this mess?’
Too often I felt like a student being lectured by a prof who’s a fan of Marx and has picked up some of that style. There’s a certian kind of self-assured statement making that invites even the kindest of us to start poking holes; something in the monkey brain hates being talked down to. Unfortunately this author stepped on that crack while looking at the stars.
But those stars are definitely worth looking at. Again and again, Mazzucato points out the amazing things that happen when we say ‘okay, how do we do it?’ instead of ‘okay, how do we sell it?’ And we need that right now, pretty badly.
The Moves
Plot
While I would have liked more nuts and bolts, overall the drive of the work is clean, direct, and to the point. Giving impeccible exampes and pointing out clear methods of moving away from ‘governments fix the problems that private industry makes’ to ‘governments choose the games and invite private industry to play’, it shows us a world where our economy is driven by solving problems instead of making sales goals. Where incentives benefit the society instead of the shareholder. And where we can really start to tackle our wicked problems, not just talk about them.
Overall Rating
A good if slightly stiff read, this book has some great ideas for the tenacious.