The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

by Mariana Mazzucato

Keynes commented, Wall Street could not ‘be claimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of laissez-faire capitalism–which is not surprising, if I am right in thinking that the best brains of Wall Street have been in fact directed towards a different object’.22 That ‘different object’, in Keynes’s view, was not a form of production, but ‘betting’–and the profits of the bookmaker were ‘a mere transfer’,23 a transfer which should be limited lest individuals ruin themselves and harm others in the process. Moreover, Keynes argued, since gambling is luck, there should be no pretence that financial speculation involved skill. Any reference to skill–or productiveness on the part of speculators–was a sign that somebody was trying to trick somebody else. Keynes also thought that the proceeds from such betting and speculating should go to the state to remove the incentive–a better word might be temptation–to reap private gains from it.24 He went on to stress the difference between this kind of speculation (value extraction) and finance for actual productive investment (value creation), which he saw as crucial for growth and which was only possible without the speculative apparatus around it. If ‘the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done’.