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Economists are the cheerleaders of finance - Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy, London, Allen Lane, 2018, 384 pp., £14.99 (pbk), ISBN 978-0-241-34779-9

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Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy, London, Allen Lane, 2018, 384 pp., £14.99 (pbk), ISBN 978-0-241-34779-9

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

David Hollanders
David Hollanders*
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
*
Corresponding author: David Hollanders, University of Amsterdam, P.O. Box 19268, 1000 GG Amsterdam, Netherlands. Email: d.a.hollanders@uva.nl
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As the subtitle of her new book suggests, Mazzucato aims to distinguish value creators from value extractors. This distinction between making and taking, between earning and deserving, between rent-seeking and value-contributing, is posited as crucial, yet it can no longer be made from within the paradigm of neoclassical economics, which has defined the distinction out of existence. Mazzucato shows this was not always so: classical economists did make the distinction, as did preceding economic schools such as the Physiocrats. This, however, is not a purely intellectual exercise; Mazzucato seeks to influence public debate, stating that “only by debunking ideas about value … can a long-lasting solution be found” (213), the problem being that what the financial sector, pharmaceutical companies, and national account statisticians call ‘value creation’ is in fact typically the opposite.

Type
Book review
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , 2018 , pp. 214 - 215
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
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© 2018 The Author(s)