Martin Wolf has reviewed Mariana Mazzucato's new book 'The Entrepreneurial State' in the FT today. He says of it:
Conventional economics offers abstract models; conventional wisdom insists the answer lies with private entrepreneurship. In this brilliant book, Mariana Mazzucato, a Sussex university professor of economics who specialises in science and technology, argues that the former is useless and the latter incomplete. Yes, innovation depends on bold entrepreneurship. But the entity that takes the boldest risks and achieves the biggest breakthroughs is not the private sector; it is the much-maligned state.
I have no doubt Mariana is right. Wolf does too, concluding:
This book has a controversial thesis. But it is basically right. The failure to recognise the role of the government in driving innovation may well be the greatest threat to rising prosperity.
I warmly recommend the book.
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The web (CERN), texting (European research Centre Paris)
Radar, jet engines, computers European originally but developed by the USA-initially by govt. money.
The concept of using satellites (Arthur C Clarke) and the rockets to get them there, (originally the Third Reich) a spin off of the race into space.
‘Tax payers helped Apple but Apple won’t help taxpayers’ – this seems to sum it up nicely. As commentators like max keiser have pointed out we have ‘socialism for the rich’ at present where Governments pretend the big corporations are doing it on their own and bleating on about ‘self reliance.’ At the same time as this is happening we are evicting people (some ill and disabled) from their family homes to save a few bent farthings and prop up the mortgage idol.
The mortgage idol being, of course, what props the banks illusion of solvency up.
Indeed!