Mariana Mazzucato

Mariana Mazzucato
File:Mariana Mazzucato 2016 (cropped).jpg Mazzucato in 2016
Born	Mariana Francesca Mazzucato (1968-06-16) June 16, 1968 Rome, Italy
Nationality	Italian; American
Spouse(s)	Carlo Cresto-Dina
Institution	University of Sussex (SPRU), University College London
Field	Economics
Alma mater	The New School (PhD, 1999) Tufts University (B.A., 1990)
Influences	Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes

Mariana Francesca Mazzucato (born June 16, 1968) is an economist with dual Italian–US citizenship. She is a professor at University College London in Economics of Innovation and Public Value and she is the founder and director of their Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP). Her research focuses on the relationships between technological, economic and social changes. She is Chair of the World Health Organization's Council on the Economics of Health for All, a member of the Scottish Government's Council of Economic Advisers, South Africa's Economic Advisory Council and the United Nation's High-Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs.

Mazzucato is the author of The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy and Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism. In 2016, Mazzucato co-edited a book, Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth with Michael Jacobs. The New Republic called her one of "the three most important thinkers about innovation" in 2013.

Early life and education

Mazzucato was born in Rome, Italy to parents Ernesto Mazzucato, a physicist, and Alessandra Mazzucato, who are both Italian. In 1972, the family moved to Princeton, New Jersey, with their three young children, Valentina, Mariana and Jacopo, after Ernesto accepted a position at Princeton University's Plasma Physics Laboratory. Mazzucato spent most of her early life in the US before returning to Europe.

In 1986, Mazzucato graduated from Princeton High School. In 1990, Mazzucato received a B.A. in history and international relations from Tufts University. In 1994, Mazzucato received a M.A. in economics from the New School for Social Research where she focused on heterodox economics. In 1999, Mazzucato earned a Ph.D. in economics from the New School's Graduate Facility of Political and Social Science. Her dissertation was called Four Essays on Evolutionary Market Share Dynamics: A Computational Approach. Her thesis advisors were Willi Semmler, Lance Taylor, Duncan K. Foley, and Charles Tilly.

Career

Academic

From 1995 to 1997, Mazzucato was an adjunct professor of economics at New York University. She taught at the University of Denver between 1997 and 1999. Between 1998 and 1999 she was a post-doctoral Marie Curie Research Fellow at the London Business School where she worked and published papers with Paul Geroski (former Dean of the London Business School).

She joined The Open University in 1999 as a lecturer, and became a full professor in 2005. She founded their Innovation, Knowledge and Development research centre. From 2008 to 2010 she was a visiting professor at Bocconi University. In 2014, she was a distinguished visiting professor at the University of Technology Sydney. Between 2011 and 2017, she was the RM Phillips Chair in the Economics of Innovation at the University of Sussex. In 2017, Mazzucato became Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London and she founded their Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP).

Economic advisory

In the early 2010s, Mazzucato joined the task force at New Economic Foundation, and European Commission (EC) Task Force on Public Sector Innovation. She was a member of World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Economics of Innovation. She was also a member of the European Commission’s expert group on Innovation for Growth (RISE). Between 2015 and 2016, she was appointed to the British Labour Party's Economic Advisory Committee, convened by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and reporting to Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn.

File:Mariana Mazzucato.jpg

Mazzucato in 2010

Mazzucato has worked as a member of the Council of Economic Advisors for Scottish Government and as a scientific advisor at the Italian Parliamentary Budget Office and their commissioner for Economic Justice. In 2017, she became a member of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network Leadership Council. In 2018, she started working as a special advisor for the EC Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, Carlos Moedas, in which role she authored the report Mission-Oriented Research & Innovation in the European Union. She is a special advisor to the Secretary General of the OECD, Angel Gurría, for the OECD's New Growth Narrative. Mazzucato joined the UN Committee for Development Policy in 2019.

In 2015 Mazzucato was commissioned to write a report for the Brazilian Government's Ministry for Science, Technology & Innovation on Brazil's innovation policy which was published on April 6, 2016. Mazzucato became the first woman to give the Raúl Prebisch Lecture organised by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean in Santiago, Chile, in April 2016.

Other activities

• Enel, Independent Member of the Board of Directors (since 2020)

Research

Innovation

Mazzucato's research focuses on the relationship between financial markets, innovation and economic growth – at the company, industry and national level. She works within the Schumpeterian framework of evolutionary economics, studying the origin and evolution of persistent differences between firms and how these differences vary across sectors and over the industry life-cycle.

Her empirical studies have focused on the automobile, PC, biotech and pharma industries. She has analysed the co-evolution of technological change and stock market bubbles. In this, she argues that stock price volatility tends to be highest, at the firm and industry level, when technological innovation is the most "radical".

In 2013 Mazzucato published The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths. The book argues that the idea of the state as a static bureaucratic organisation only needed to ‘fix’ market failures, leaving dynamic entrepreneurship and innovation to the private sector, is wrong. She outlines a number of case studies across different sectors, including biotech, pharmaceuticals and clean technology, to show that the high-risk investments are being made by the state before the private sector gets involved. In a chapter examining the iPhone, she outlines how the technologies that make it ‘smart’ – the internet, GPS, its touchscreen display and the voice-activated Siri – were all government-funded.

Two chapters in the book are dedicated to the emerging ‘green technology’ revolution. She details the public funds that she argues are laying the groundwork for this revolution in a similar way that the state invested in the most high-risk areas of biotech and nanotech. The book concludes with the contention that in all these examples, the risks were socialized while the rewards were privatized, and considers different ways to change this dynamic to produce more ‘inclusive growth’.

Value creation and destruction

She focused on inequality in her work with William Lazonick. Their 2013 joint article, "The Risk-Reward Nexus: Who takes the risks? Who gets the rewards?" describes the tension between how value is created and how value is extracted in modern-day capitalism. The authors argue that there is a disproportionate balance between the 'collective' distribution of risk taking in the innovation process, and the increasingly narrow distribution of the rewards.

In a paper for the think tank Policy Network called "Rebalancing What?", Mazzucato argues that the problem is not only one of short-termism, it is also about the way in which financial activities focused on value extraction have been rewarded above activities focused on value creation – often leading to value destruction. Her book The Value of Everything: making and taking in the global economy, published in 2018, describes how financial companies act as rent-seekers rather than creating value themselves, and that current legislation encourages that type of behaviour.

Market shaping

Since 2014, Mazzucato has developed her critique of "market failure theory" and her concept of the state's role in the economy as one of "creating and shaping new markets" rather than just fixing them. Her work with Carlota Perez has considered how such a view can enable a new understanding of ‘green’ as a redirection of the entire economy. Her work with Caetano Penna has focussed on the way in which a mission-oriented market-shaping framework can provide a new understanding of the role of state investment banks.

Reception

Jayati Ghosh, writing for Nature, wrote that Mission Economy is a "timely and optimistic vision" of solving major problems through directed private and public investment. She argued that Mazzucato's arguments seem simple and obvious, but are in fact revolutionary, implying a new role for governments.

John Kay wrote in the Financial Times that Mission Economy's proposals would lead to powerful governments driving and co-ordinated every stage of innovation to solve issues from cancer to climate change. Kay argues that such projects tend to be failures, because political direction of innovation would have led to absence of objective feedback, whereas efficient progress tends to require very competitive markets with incremental innovation and power decentralized to individual entrepreneurs with their independent visions.

Pope Francis said, when talking about The Value of Everything, "I believe [her vision] can help to think about the future." US Senator Marco Rubio credited Mazzucato's work on value in one of his economic proposals.

Martin Wolf wrote in the Financial Times that The Entrepreneurial State offers "a controversial thesis," but "it is basically right," and warns that the "failure to recognise the role of the government in driving innovation may well be the greatest threat to rising prosperity." Robert Atkinson stated that "it is one thing to legitimize the state as a driver of innovation and give credit where credit is due – something [Mazzucato's] book does masterfully", but "it is another thing altogether to craft effective innovation policy that deals with risk in a politically acceptable way."

In a column for The Economist, it was argued that she is "too hard on business" but that Mazzucato was right about the state's "central role in producing game-changing breakthroughs", and that its "contribution to the success of technology-based businesses should not be underestimated." Tim Worstall, research fellow at the neoliberal think tank Adam Smith Institute, argues that Mazzucato offers a confused definition of public goods, which is a "crucial point," since "the non-rivalrous and non-excludable nature [of public goods] make them difficult to profit from," and thus the private sector would not be interested in them.

Personal life

Mazzucato is married to Carlo Cresto-Dina, an Italian film producer, and they have four children.

Media

In 2012, Mazzucato did a TED talk on her book, "The Entrepreneurial State." In 2013, Mazzucato did a TED talk on the role of government in innovation, titled "Government - investor, risk-taker, innovator." In 2020, Mazzucato did a TED talk on economic value, titled "What is economic value, and who creates it?" In 2020, Mazzucato did a TED talk on how to improve capitalism, titled "The COVID-19 crisis is a chance to do capitalism differently." In 2021, Mazzucato discussed her book "Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism" on Talks at Google.

Awards and nominations

In 2013, Mazzucato's book Entrepreneurial State was listed in Financial Times Selection of Books of the Year. The book also won her the New Statesman/SPERI Prize in Political Economy in the next year. In the same year, a German translation of The Entrepreneurial State (Das Kapital des Staates) was shortlisted for the "German Business Book Prize" (“Deutscher Wirtschaftsbuchpreis”). She was awarded the 2016 Hans-Matthöfer book prize by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, associated with the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

She was awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa by Argentine National University of San Martín. She was also awarded an honorary doctorate by Belgian Hasselt University in 2017. The Simon Fraser University awarded her an honorary degree in 2020.

In 2018, her research focused on how governments foster innovation won her the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.

In 2019, she was awarded the All European Academies Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values, honoring her contributions for analyzing the governments' roles in fostering innovation. A year later, she received the John von Neumann Award.

Her 2018 book The Value of Everything was shortlisted for that year's Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year prize.

In 2020, she was awarded the John von Neumann Award, which is given annually by Rajk College to a social sciences scholar whose works have had substantial influence over a long period of time on the studies and intellectual activity of the students of the college.

In 2021, she received the Grande Ufficiale Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana, the highest civilian honor of the Italian government.

Selected works and publications

Works

• Wikidata (View with Reasonator)

Selected publications

• Wikidata (View with Reasonator)
• Wikidata (View with Reasonator)