Mariana Mazzucato, economics professor at University College London, came to the Hay Festival (despite a high fever) to deliver a stirring appeal for a new approach to talking about money. Since the 1980s, we have become accustomed to describing the economy in ways that reflect a structure skewed towards the very rich, she said, and that needs to change.
It has become almost impossible to discuss an alternative to the heavily financialised system currently dominating the English-speaking countries. "Perhaps the reason the Left is losing the argument around the world is because the idea of where wealth comes from has been captured,” she said. "When you talk about policy in boring and lame ways, you get boring and lame policies. Plato, a smart guy, said storytellers rule the world. So we need to tell different stories.”
At the moment—as happened in the 2008 crisis -- the government leaves markets alone and then steps in to mend the damage that results from them going wrong. This is driven by the idea that states need to be small for the economy to be dynamic, but doesn’t actually result in small states, since there is so much work to be done picking up the pieces of the economy.
It would be far better and cheaper in the long run, she said, to shape the market in new ways so they never ended up broken at all. Consumers, governments and private companies are all stakeholders in the economy, and should all have a role in shaping its structures.
“It’s not enough to tax the wealth, we need new stories about wealth,” she said. "What the U.K. lacks is patient, committed, long term finance. If you lend money to organisations to solve problems, that actually costs you less money.”
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