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  1. You must read the article before you can comment on it.
    • Alexa4 years ago

      An interesting longread about Mariana Mazzucato, an economist with innovative ideas for tackling some of the problems of capitalism.

      I never considered that companies like Tesla & Google got their start with public money. It's a cool look at how innovation starts, and where pressure is coming from to get the public a "return on their investment" instead of just consolidating cash in big companies.

      Encouragingly, her work is getting real traction in EU and US politics. Her unorthodox approach is ‘mission-oriented’, employing similar tactics used for the Apollo program.

      These mission-oriented institutions were actively creating and shaping markets, rather than merely fixing them. They were ambitiously seeking high-risk directions for research and investment, rather than outsourcing and avoiding uncertainty.

      • SEnkey4 years ago

        I do think it is more than fair to build into these grants a return plus interest policy if it turns out well. The earlier they pay it back the less it costs type deal.

        But it is important to remember that the public does benefit from these investments. Everyone benefits from Google, even if google is evil. I can't afford anything from Tesla, but the work they are doing on electric batteries etc will show up elsewhere in the market eventually (and probably far cheaper).

    • jeff4 years ago

      Well this is absolutely terrifying! Since when is the military-industrial complex something to be celebrated, replicated and doubled down on? It isn't a fix for capitalism, it's the epitome of crony capitalism and we certainly don't need any more of that.

      Mazzucato keeps hearkening back to the Apollo program (which cost $152bn in today's dollars) as a model for mission-oriented initiatives but completely ignores the opportunity cost of such programs. All those tens or hundreds of billions of dollars being allocated by decree siphon resources away from and prevent the development of competing alternatives. She also misrepresents the benefits derived from such programs by trivializing the productization of research developments and discoveries; an oversight that only an academic who has never brought a product to market could make.

      There is also conveniently no mention of any examples of these initiatives going sideways. No mention of the billions wasted on programs like The Human Brain Project, bad loans to the Solyndras of the world or massive projects like ITER that span decades, cost billions and move ahead with designs and technology that are already becoming obsolete due to the momentum of government sponsorship.

      Here's my proposal to fix capitalism: We remove the subsidies and either give the money back to the people who earned it in the first place or reallocate it to underfunded government departments that actually serve the public.

      “Those profits could be used to fund research and training for workers,” Mazzucato says. “Instead they are often used on share buybacks and golfing.”

      Right. Let's get the tax payers off the hook. Of course they're not going to spend it on research when the government is offering to foot the bill.

      • SEnkey4 years ago

        Agreed. This appears like a great idea, but anyone who has worked in big corporations or government can tell you how quickly these things are sidelined into turf wars, funding fights, and bureaucratic malaise. Worse, it then becomes entrenched. The first time the defense department has ever been audited was under Mattis, a few years ago. I doubt they'll do it again in a hurry. I don't love our current system, but companies do have one thing going for them, when they fail repeatedly - they die.