Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 195 of Deirdre McCloskey’s and Alberto Mingardi’s superb 2020 book, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State:

But leaping into the Supply Chain Fallacy, as [Mariana] Mazzucato does with both feet, makes it easy in modern circumstances of the massive State to conclude that the entrepreneurship of the State is necessary all over the place. One looks down the supply chain of any innovation for any instance of State action, then one assigns “cause” to the instance (without considering private substitutes as counterfactuals), and concludes triumphantly that the State rules. It’s like saying that, because the road outside Google’s office in Mountain View was built by the city, the city of Mountain View caused the search engine.