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November 28, 2019 05:08 pm PST

Profile of Mariana Mazzucato, the economist who's swaying both left and right politicians with talk of "the entrepreneurial state"

Mariana Mazzucato (previously) came to prominence after the publication of her 2013 book The Entrepreneurial State, which described the way that robust state spending on large-scale R&D was critical to the kinds of commercial technological "breakthroughs" that the private sector liked to take credit for, and argued that the decades-long drawdown in public spending on the theory that governments were bloated and inefficient had stalled economic growth and technological progress because private firms systematically underinvest in research.

Mazzucato is a left-wing economist, but she is critical of the left's framing of economic controversies, saying that leftists overemphasize "wealth redistribution" and ignore "wealth creation" -- the latter being something states are absolutely essential to. In Mazzucato's framing, redistribution attacks the problem of inequality too late, after a small number of people have been able to hoard the lion's share of benefits from state investment, and then seeks to claw some of that money back.

But if economic critiques are focused on wealth creation, with the state assuming its rightful place at the center of this process, then it becomes natural to insist that (for example) governments receive royalties or other benefits from the use of publicly developed resources.

It's a framing that's gained widespread support on both the left and the right, attracting supporters like both Elizabeth Warren and Marco Rubio.

It part, the success of Mazzucato's framing is due to her emphasis on language, substituting words like "create" and "invest" to describe state spending, rather than neoliberal terms like "fix" and "spend."

I am generally in favor of this framing, but also concerned that it spells the end of any idea of a "commons" arising from government work -- for example, in the USA, products of the federal government are all in the public domain, meaning that anyone can access US Geological Survey map data (as opposed to the UK, where the government-created ordinance survey maps can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to license if you want to build a new service on them). Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/NirK1Ie8JZ4/freeriders-v-capture.html

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