The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies

by Mariana Mazzucato

In a recent policy paper one of us co-authored with the United Nations Development Programme, we found the pandemic revealed “core government functions.”[6] These included: Adapting and learning in the face of incomplete, at times conflicting, information and radical uncertainty; Aligning public services and citizen needs; Governing resilient production systems and capabilities to foster symbiotic public-private collaborations and tapping into citizen innovation; Capacity to govern data and digital infrastructures, including handling the “infodemic” while balancing human rights protection; and Inter- and intra-governmental learning and coordination (including at different levels of government, e.g., federal and local, inter-ministerial and international).