mazzucato23_Darrian TraynorGetty Images)_vaccine manufacture

Fra «moonshots» til «earthshots»

Feb 3, 2021 Mariana Mazzucato

LONDON – COVID-19 har avdekket den moderne kapitalismens mange svakheter. Og i mange land, har tidligere kutt i sosialpolitiske budsjetter og offentlige helsetjenester forsterket pandemiens skadevirkninger. Samtidig har andre selvpåførte skader ført til utilstrekkelig koordinering og implementering av politiske tiltak. Massetesting og sporing, produksjon av medisinsk utstyr og undervisning under «lockdown» har blitt skadelidende som følge av dette.

Statsmakter som har investert i evnen til å løse problemer og takle kriser har derimot gjort det langt bedre. Dette ser vi klarest i utviklingslandene, der Vietnam og den indiske delstaten Kerala skiller seg ut som eksempler til etterfølgelse.

Framfor å opptre som aktive investorer i første instans, har alt for mange lands myndigheter blitt passive långivere i siste instans som først tar tak i problemene etter at de har gjort seg gjeldende. Men som vi burde ha lært under den store resesjonen (i kjølvannet av finanskrisen i 2008), koster det langt mer å redde nasjonale økonomier under en krise enn å ha en proaktiv tilnærming til offentlige investeringer.

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Mariana Mazzucato

Writing for PS since 2015
26 Commentaries

Mariana Mazzucato, Professor of the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London and Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, is Chair of the World Health Organization's Council on the Economics of Health for All. She is the author of The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, and, most recently, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism.

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Mariana Mazzucato calls reform of the platform-dominated market for personal data the main economic challenge of our time.

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Carlos Rodrigo Zapata Feb 7, 2021

"Best practices" are a good guide to aiming for the best. The question is, if the conditions exist to implement that experience. The Moonshot experience is undoubtedly a great lesson for all those who want to cooperate, coordinate and combine experiences, skills, know-how and many more contributions. The Moonshot was made possible, among others, by the cold war. It was the economic and military complex that responded to the Soviet challenge. Laika and Gagarin was too much.
There was a moment of euphoria to give a scientific-technological response to Soviet power. All centers of power in America felt challenged, but determined to achieve what President Kennedy had so defiantly and sovereignly announced. They succeeded in time, despite the assassination of the president and the change of two other presidents.
The question is how an environment of such euphoria and determination is generated to face other Moonshots or better, new Earthshots. Leadership is essential. Kennedy embodied it, seeding the idea and putting it into action. How was the participation of so many collaborators and interests achieved, why did they see in this idea of sending a man to the moon and bringing him back to earth alive and well, such a transcendental task? I think these are the issues that should be clarified.
It is clear that so far, for example, the climate debacle has not been enough to produce that state of euphoria and determination. Not even the drama of COVID 19 has been enough to produce vaccines as global public goods. It will be essential to work on these sensitive and mysterious aspects that help to achieve great feats. The fundamental stones have already been laid by Mariana Mazzucato with her Mission Economy Approach. What they are about is that they serve to build our responses to the immense challenges that lie ahead.
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Michael Public Feb 4, 2021

What are you talking about that it cannot be repeated? On their current trajectory SpaceX will within 10 years land a man on the Moon for easily 1% the cost of the US government did it for.
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Jag Patel Feb 4, 2021

Whereas it is entirely true to say that the public sector has been hollowed out by the widely applied practice of outsourcing provision of public services to the private sector, one must ask the question why this has come to be in so many mature democracies around the world.

Could it be that public servants have done such a bad job of delivering public services over the last several decades, that the successive generations of politicians who have had to take the flak have been left with no alternative?

To put it in context, there are two types of working people in society – those in the pay of the State and those who are not in the pay of the State. Being in the pay of the State means that these people can use their official position to perform the functions of the State (like intervening to fix market failures or using the instrument of regulation to curb anti-competitive behaviour), by authorising the expenditure of public funds in the name of the Secretary of State and committing other people, also in the pay of the State underneath them, to make things happen.

More often than not, this involves buying goods, services and labour worth some £292bn per year in the UK from people who are not in the pay of the State – namely, the private sector or sometimes, the third sector. Mainly because their own side is inept and simply not up to the job!

But the problem with people in the pay of the State is that they are not well-informed about how the private sector works, because they have not known anything but the public sector. Indeed, they haven’t got a clue about what it is that drives the behaviour of for-profit organisations in the free market – not least because they have not spent a single day of their lives in the private sector – and yet they have been put in charge of spending taxpayers’ money to buy goods, services and labour from non-public sector organisations. What’s more, people in the pay of the State are very good at talking a “big game” but they can’t “do it”.

Their standing is further diminished by the fact that their ability to innovate, solve problems, learn from past mistakes and adapt to change, which is a distinctive characteristic of people in the private sector, has been erased in the public sector due to incessant conditioning of the mind from an early age.

Which would probably explain why some parts of the private sector such as the defence industry, for example, has failed so miserably to deliver military equipment to the Armed Forces which is fit for purpose, adequately sustained in-service and constitutes value for money through-life for as long as anyone can remember.

Defence contractors may very well call themselves public companies and have their shares quoted on the stock market, but they really are private sector organisations in name only, not least, because they are “created in the image” of public sector institutions like MoD Abbey Wood in Bristol (warts ’n all) displaying all the tell-tale features of: a workforce made-up entirely of people who were previously in the pay of the State (where they developed an unhealthy penchant for rules, regulations and processes), who have succeeded in transplanting a work culture characterised by failed practices of management by committee & PowerPoint presentations and groupthink that disallows external challenge.
@JagPatel3
- Michael Public Feb 4, 2021
  
  Not in Scandinavia, Australia, NZ, Canada and much of Western Europe. There are risks both ways - certain government heavy approaches, like in South Africa who has the highest public wage bill per capita, and near non-existent service delivery, can bring a country to its knees. What is needed is the right mix.
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