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

by Mariana Mazzucato

Workers, in other words, are exploited because capitalists pocket the surplus value workers produce over and above their subsistence requirements.

As long as products and services fetch a price on the market, they are worthy of being included in GDP; whether they contribute to value or extract it is ignored. The result is that the distinction between profits and rents is confused and value extraction (rent) can masquerade as value creation.

there is no point to the economy unless it helps people to lead better lives–and that quite reasonably means, at least in part, happier lives.

risks in the innovation economy are socialized, while the rewards are privatized.

In patent-intensive sectors like pharmaceuticals, greater patent protection has not led to increases in innovation. In fact, the opposite has happened. We have more drugs with little or no therapeutic value.

The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.

If, through austerity, cuts are made to essential areas that create the capacity for future growth (education, infrastructure, care for a healthy population), then GDP (however ill defined) will not grow.

The crucial point here is that zero government return on investment is a political choice, not a scientific inevitability.

Market-oriented reforms of healthcare fail to appreciate the evidence that there is no such thing as a competitive market for those services: contracts run for several years and they are granted to a small number of firms which come to dominate the outsourcing market. Those firms become effectively specialized in winning contracts from the public sector across different fields in which they do not have a corresponding expertise.

through equity-holding, conditions on reinvestment, caps on prices, or the need to keep patents as narrow as possible.