We Sent A Man To The Moon And Back
As conversations and discussions from the UNGA meetings last week continue to resonate, I thought about Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide To Changing Capitalism by Mariana Mazzucato. Mariana Mazzucato is a professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London. She is also the founding director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purposes. She advises global policymakers and is chair of the World Health Organization’s Council on the Economics of Health for All and a member of the UN’s High-level Advocacy Board on Economic and Social Affairs.
The theme of Mission Economy is the concept of integrating public purpose into the creation of a mission-driven economy and redefining the relationship between the public and private sectors. According to Mariana, it is to the future young women scholars and practitioners that this book is also dedicated. Published in 2021 during the pandemic, the book highlights the pressing challenges to every member of society around the world. These challenges demand not just technological but also social, organizational, and political innovations.
Mission Economy begins with the Apollo mission as a starting point for a dialogue about mission-oriented policies on Earth. Missions provide an opportunity for citizen involvement in addressing significant societal challenges. It is encouraging that some countries are engaging and involving citizens in the design of missions as their core principle of public-sector innovation, just as it is an innovative private-sector practice. Missions also serve as exemplary models that contributed to the formulation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Mission Economy delves into the limitation of mainstream economic approaches, such as relying solely on a carbon tax and some R&D subsidies to tackle climate change, that have left us with negligent carbon tax systems and a worrying slow green transition.
The conventional wisdom portrays the government as a clunky bureaucratic party that cannot innovate but just to fix and regulate the markets. Many think governments should simply get out of the way so the risk-takers in private business can play the game. Mission Economy argues that markets are not the outcomes of individual decision-making but of how each value-creator is governed – including the government itself. The book acknowledges how governments can become less effective by elucidating the “complexity paradox” of modern public policy: the more complex policy issues are, the more compartmentalized policymaking becomes, fragmented into different and sometimes competing government departments and initiatives. As a result, the flow of information is limited and that constrains creativity.
The section on narrowing the digital divide mission underscores the significance of creating a mission map that prioritizes attention to behavioral, regulatory, and political aspects. The digital divide is a global problem, and in the USA alone, 21 million people lack internet access, and only two-thirds of Americans have a home broadband connection. Advanced technologies such as AI have the potential to exacerbate this existing digital divide.
Mariana presents seven key pillars for a more effective political economy in Mission Economy, and she elaborates on each of them in detail.
Value (Collective Creation of Value)
Markets (Fixing Market Failures vs. Co-creating Markets)
Organizations (Dynamic Capabilities)
Finance (Outcome Based Financing)
Distribution (Redistribution vs. Pre-distribution)
Partnership (Parasitic Partnerships vs. Symbiotic Partnerships)
Participation (Open Systems to Co-design)
The book comprises four parts: A Mission Grounded (What stands in the way of the next moonshot), A Mission Impossible (What it takes to achieve our boldest ambitions), Missions in Action (What grand challenges we should tackle today), and The Next Mission (Reimagining the economy and our future). The book then concludes with a section titled Changing Capitalism, where Mariana attributes a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
Mission Economy confronts readers with numerous pressing global issues. However, it also leaves readers with a sense of hope that a better life is indeed possible, offering some tools to reimagine the world.