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A review by miguelf
The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato
4.0
Mazzucato makes a very convincing case for continued State support of investment into key R&D initiatives, where government has showed a strong string of successes throughout the past 100 years. She demonstrates how prior government funded programs and initiatives have paid back private industry and society in the form of key technologies and platforms. One need look no further than the Internet to see this.
In engineering management graduate work (not exactly a bastion of progressive thought), one comes across numerous DARPA related projects that are viewed as great successes. Yet conservatives will scream to the hilt about examples like Solyndra (which Mazzucato addresses fully) that show that the Govt can’t invest correctly, essentially saying that the Govt must bat 100% with every investment dollar, while private equity has a success rate that often falls short (also conservatives have no problem with privatizing gains but socializing losses when the values are high enough – see the ’08 crash and the current Covid bailouts as examples). Mazzucato argues how Govt is best positioned for a number of important areas for funding – areas that private industry views as too risky to take on and where scale is needed (fusion research as a quintessential example). My only quibble with the book is that the topic is so common sense that there shouldn’t need to be a full length volume describing this, yet here we are in 2020 and this is not a convincing argument to many in the US.
In engineering management graduate work (not exactly a bastion of progressive thought), one comes across numerous DARPA related projects that are viewed as great successes. Yet conservatives will scream to the hilt about examples like Solyndra (which Mazzucato addresses fully) that show that the Govt can’t invest correctly, essentially saying that the Govt must bat 100% with every investment dollar, while private equity has a success rate that often falls short (also conservatives have no problem with privatizing gains but socializing losses when the values are high enough – see the ’08 crash and the current Covid bailouts as examples). Mazzucato argues how Govt is best positioned for a number of important areas for funding – areas that private industry views as too risky to take on and where scale is needed (fusion research as a quintessential example). My only quibble with the book is that the topic is so common sense that there shouldn’t need to be a full length volume describing this, yet here we are in 2020 and this is not a convincing argument to many in the US.