Governments Do Capitalism Wrong. Here’s How We Fix It.

Mariana Mazzucato is a towering figure in contemporary economics, known best for her work on the entrepreneurial state and mission-oriented, ‘moonshot’ economics. Her congregation is broad, ranging from an ascendant Andy Burnham, to the Pope, to the organisers of Brazil’s carnival, and Marco Rubio on the right of US politics. Ash Sarkar sat down with Mariana Mazzucato in front of a live audience at EartH Theatre in Hackney, to test out the ideas in her new book, The Common Good Economy.

Where did it all go wrong for Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, who adopted Mazzucato’s language of missions but were unable to deliver, and what can Burnham learn from their mistakes? How do we define the common good, and how should the private and public sectors work to achieve it? Why is the state so effective at achieving its goals in times of war, and so inept in times of peace? How do we balance the need for experimentation and freedom to fail, against the need for transparency, in the public sector? And should we spend our finite time trying to build a new and fundamentally different system, or is fixing capitalism actually the most radical goal for progressives?