What’s the “Moonshot Model” of Economics?

MARIANA MAZZUCATO, AUTHOR, “MISSION ECONOMY: A MOONSHOT GUIDE TO CHANGING CAPITALISM”: So, really, this is about refocusing government on its purpose. You know, when people say there is not enough money to do something, they sometimes forget that there is huge amounts of money being disbursed in all sorts of different ways. For example, every government department all over the world has a procurement budget, right, government as also purchaser. It also might give out loans. It gives out grants. So, the idea is, how do we bring purpose and missions at the center of this interface between the public sector and the private sector? And what the moon landing did 15 years ago and, of course, that was more of a technological mission. And, today, we have much more kind of societal ones that are much more wicked in terms of the behavioral and political challenges that they embody. But, still, what it did was, it was a massive collaborative effort between a public entity, the national space agency, and lots of different private firms, from Honeywell, Motorola, General Electric, and also smaller firms. And, today well, actually, this week, we have the World Economic Forum happening. and there’s all this talk about stakeholder capitalism, but that’s often just a discussion about corporate governance, right, companies having to look at the long term, not just maximizing shares. But what would it look like if we bring stakeholder governance and purpose at the center of the interface between public and private, as the moon landing did? But, also, that means paying a lot of attention, as NASA did, to the contracts, to the procurement contracts, to the way that we actually collaborate. And I don’t think there’s any other time like COVID that makes this an incredibly urgent point, because even something like the vaccine, there’s collaboration. Of course, there’s public and private money, but if we don’t govern it with a purpose, we really risk doing it in a problematic, not a symbiotic and mutualistic way, but a way that, unfortunately, has also been characterized in different sectors, when government kind of misses the plot of what its real role is in terms of focusing on the lives of the citizens that it serves.