The Value of Everything Quotes

“It’s not easy to feel good about yourself when you are constantly being told you’re rubbish and/or part of the problem. That’s often the situation for people working in the public sector, whether these be nurses, civil servants or teachers. The static metrics used to measure the contribution of the public sector, and the influence of Public Choice theory on making governments more ‘efficient’, has convinced many civil-sector workers they are second-best. It’s enough to depress any bureaucrat and induce him or her to get up, leave and join the private sector, where there is often more money to be made. So public actors are forced to emulate private ones, with their almost exclusive interest in projects with fast paybacks. After all, price determines value. You, the civil servant, won’t dare to propose that your agency could take charge, bring a helpful long-term perspective to a problem, consider all sides of an issue (not just profitability), spend the necessary funds (borrow if required) and – whisper it softly – add public value. You leave the big ideas to the private sector which you are told to simply ‘facilitate’ and enable. And when Apple or whichever private company makes billions of dollars for shareholders and many millions for top executives, you probably won’t think that these gains actually come largely from leveraging the work done by others – whether these be government agencies, not-for-profit institutions, or achievements fought for by civil society organizations including trade unions that have been critical for fighting for workers’ training programmes.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

“Policy is not just about ‘intervening’. It is about shaping a different future: co-creating markets and value, not just ‘fixing’ markets or redistributing value. It’s about taking risks, not only ‘de-risking’. And it must not be about levelling the playing field but about tilting it towards the kind of economy we want.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

“Governments and central banks were quietly admitting something they were still reluctant to announce publicly: the extraordinary power of private-sector banks lending to determine the pace of money creation, and therefore economic growth.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

“Some heterodox economists today argue that growth will fall if finance becomes too big relative to the rest of the economy (industry) because real profits come from the production of new goods and services rather than from simple transfers of money earned from those goods and services.40 To ‘rebalance’ the economy, the argument runs, we must allow genuine profits from production to win over rents–which, as we can see here, is exactly the argument Ricardo made 200 years ago, and John Maynard Keynes was to make 100 years later.41”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

“His metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’ has been cited ad nauseam to support the current orthodoxy that markets, left to themselves, may lead to a socially optimal outcome–indeed, more beneficial than if the state intervenes”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

“It is crucial to understand that economic policy is not scientifically
ordained. You can impose austerity and hope the economy grows, even
though such a policy deprives it of demand; or you can focus on investing
in areas like health, training, education, research and infrastructure with
the belief that these areas are critical for long-run growth in GDP. In the
end, the choice of policy depends heavily on one’s perspective on the role
of government in the economy – is it key to creating value, or at best a
cheerleader on the sidelines?”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

“In essence, we behave as economic actors according to the vision of the world of those who device the accounting conventions. The marginalist theory of value underlying contemporary national accounting systems leads to an indiscriminate attribution of productivity to anyone grabbing a large income and downplays the productivity of the less fortunate. In so doing, it justifies excessive inequalities of income and wealth and turns value extraction into value creation.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

“Se dice a los funcionarios públicos que den un paso atrás, que minimicen costes, que piensen como el sector privado y que teman cometer errores. Y se ordena a los ministerios de los gobiernos que reduzcan costes y que, de manera inevitable, se deshagan también de habilidades y recursos de las estructuras públicas en cuestión (departamentos, agencias, etcétera). Cuando el Gobierno deja de invertir en su propia capacidad, se vuelve menos seguro de sí mismo, menos capaz, y aumenta la probabilidad del fracaso. Asimismo, se hace más difícil justificar la existencia de una función particular del Gobierno, lo que conduce a mayores recortes o a una eventual privatización. Esta falta de fe en el Gobierno, pues, se convierte en una profecía autocumplida: cuando no creemos en la capacidad gubernamental para crear valor, a la larga no puede hacerlo.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, El valor de las cosas: Quién produce y quién gana en la economía global

“Bogle has estimated an all-in cost for actively managed funds of 2.27 per cent of the funds’ value. The amounts may not seem excessive. But Bogle never tires of saying to fund investors: ‘Do not allow the tyranny of compounding costs to overwhelm the magic of compounding returns.’38 In fact, if you assume Bogle’s estimate of fund management costs and also assume an annual return of 7 per cent, the total return to a saver over forty years will be 65 per cent higher without the charges. In hard cash, the difference could mean retiring with $100,000 or $165,000.39 It’s a good deal for the fund manager; rather less so for the investor.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

“La economía es vista como una máquina de crecimiento perpetuo, en la que cada vez más gente gana un salario de subsistencia.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, El valor de las cosas: Quién produce y quién gana en la economía global

“asumía que los trabajadores subestimarían la capacidad adquisitiva de sus sueldos y, por lo tanto, estarían dispuestos a producir más de lo que necesitaban. De esta manera, la sobreproducción involuntaria de los trabajadores crearía, a su vez, desempleo involuntario —ya que serían necesarios menos trabajadores para hacer la misma cantidad de trabajo— y la economía se encontraría en un equilibrio de baja producción.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, El valor de las cosas: Quién produce y quién gana en la economía global

“In 2009 Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, claimed that ‘The people of Goldman Sachs are among the most productive in the world.’3 Yet, just the year before, Goldman had been a major contributor to the worst financial and economic crisis since the 1930s. US taxpayers had to stump up $125 billion to bail it out. In light of the terrible performance of the investment bank just a year before, such a bullish statement by the CEO was extraordinary. The bank laid off 3,000 employees between November 2007 and December 2009, and profits plunged.4 The bank and some its competitors were fined, although the amounts were small relative to later profits: fines of $550 million for Goldman and $297 million for J. P. Morgan, for example.5 Despite everything, Goldman–along with other banks and hedge funds–proceeded to bet against the very instruments which they had created and which had led to such turmoil.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

“Ricardo was drawn to economics by reading Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, but was concerned with something that he felt was glaringly absent from Smith’s theory of value: how that value was distributed throughout society–or what we would today call income distribution. It need hardly be said that, in today’s world of growing inequality of income and wealth, this question remains profoundly relevant.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

“His positioning of government on the ‘unproductive’ side of the boundary set the tone for much subsequent analysis and is a recurring theme in today’s debates about government’s role in the economy, epitomized by the Thatcher–Reagan reassertion in the 1980s of the primacy of markets in solving economic and social issues.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

“He felt that the enemies of growth were, first, the protectionist policies of mercantilists; second, the guilds protecting artisans’ privileges; and third, a nobility that squandered its money on unproductive labour and lavish consumption. For Smith (as for Quesnay), employing an overly large portion of labour for unproductive purposes–such as the hoarding of cash, a practice that still afflicts our modern economies–prevents a nation from accumulating wealth.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

“There is basically nothing new in the calls to protect Western steel producers from Chinese imports or to subsidize domestic low-carbon energy generation to substitute for imports of oil, gas and coal. The emphasis by populist politicians on the negative effect of free trade, and the need to put up different types of walls to prevent the free movement of goods and labour, also gestures back to the mercantilist era, with emphasis more on getting the prices right (including exchange rates and wages) than on making the investments needed to create long-run growth and higher per capita income.”
― Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy