Book review: Mission Economy

The world is simultaneously facing many challenges - climate change, inequality, population ageing, persistent gender gaps, the digital divide, transition to green energy, pandemic disease, and more. How are governments to best deal with these problems? In her recent book, Mission Economy, Mariana Mazzucato offers her view on a framework for developing solutions to society's wicked problems. Mazzucato, a professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London, argues for a mission-oriented approach. The exemplar that Mazzucato uses is the Apollo program which, in less than a decade, successfully launched astronauts to the moon and brought them back safely. Apollo focused resources on a single measurable goal, aligning public and private organisations towards a common goal.

I have a lot of sympathy for Mazzucato's proposal. On the whole, governments and the private sector are consistently failing to adequately tackle the modern world's key problems. It may require a radical readjustment in the overall approach, and that is what Mazzucato is offering. In the concluding section of the book, she offers seven key pillars for a new political economy to guide the mission-oriented approach:

1. A new approach to value, with business, government, and civil society creating value together;
2. A different framing of policy related to markets, moving from fixing market failures to actively co-creating and co-shaping markets;
3. Organisational change, particularly for governments to reduce outsourcing and to share risk with the private sector;
4. A change in the way that budgets and public financing are considered, moving from the economy serving finance, to finance serving the economy;
5. Distribution and inclusive growth, focusing on predistribution and not just redistribution;
6. A greater focus on partnership and stakeholder value; and
7. Participation in the creation process, through a revival of debate, discussion, and consensus-building.

There is a lot that is arguable in the discussion of those pillars, but also a lot to like about the overall vision. However, despite the attractiveness of the ideas Mazzucato forwards in this book, there are several key problems that I felt were not adequately addressed. The first problem is how missions are chosen. Mazzucato devotes a fair amount of attention to this point, but her solution, based on democratic institutions, discussion, and consensus-building to me ignores the problems inherent in such an approach. The Apollo program worked well, but it was a mission that was chosen by President Kennedy in a top-down fashion. If, as Mazzucato contends, we are to build missions from the ground up, how are we to contend with competing preferences. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem reigns here. A system that results in multiple different concurrent missions simply risks competition for the same resources. Mazzucato refers to the Sustainable Development Goals, but there are 17 of them (with 169 targets) - this is the same problem that faces the 'beyond GDP' agenda (as I noted in my recent reviews of Measuring What Counts and For Good Measure, here and here). The Apollo program worked because there was a single mission to focus on, not 17 competing (albeit somewhat complementary) missions. The democratic approach to choosing a mission is also fraught, likely to lead to missions that suit the majority and ignore or pay minimal lip service to minority preferences. Mazzucato makes reference to Gil Scott-Heron's poem "Whitey on the Moon" (a stinging critique of the focus on the Apollo programme, while many of society's problems, and especially those relevant to African Americans, remained unsolved). However, Mazzucato's book lacks the necessary reflection that the mission-oriented approach needs to find some way to avoid the same problems that Scott-Heron refers to.

Mazzucato provides a critique of capitalism in her book, and argues that we need something better. However, the best mission-oriented economies are command economies. If you want to radically change economic and political institutions, or build infrastructure with minimal delays, having a completely centralised economy is one way to achieve it.

Second, and relatedly, the Apollo program worked well when there was one true source of information. The government could effectively control the narrative, and didn't have to worry too much about sniping from the sidelines. When social media gives everyone a platform to openly critique the government, it is difficult to maintain a focus on a single project, especially where there is always a chance that something is not going perfectly to plan. We've actually seen this in action in a way that is far too close for comfort. You could argue that New Zealand's response to the pandemic was mission-oriented. The mission was to eliminate the virus and prevent COVID-related deaths. Society was mostly on board with this mission, but not everyone. And every time that some part or other of the mission wasn't working perfectly, everyone was a critic. It would be even worse in a more politically polarised country than New Zealand. Mazzucato doesn't engage with this problem at all. It's not clear that she would want to, since 'controlling the narrative' in the modern sense is a tool employed by the most controlling autocratic regimes.

Finally, and potentially the biggest problem, is that there is a very real difference between a mission that is solving what is almost entirely an engineering, physics, and mathematics problem, and a mission that is trying to solve a human problem. To be fair, Mazzucato is aware of this point, writing that:

All this brings us back to the point that social missions are harder to fulfil than purely technological ones because they combine political, regulatory and behavioural changes.

That may be the understatement that defines this book. People are not simply chess pieces to be moved on a societal board. They have their own motivations and desires. Even if you can align them with a single goal in mind, people don't always do what you want. Solving human problems is hard. If it was easy, we would have done it already. If it was as easy as solving an engineering problem, then the most successful countries would be run by engineers. And excluding China (Xi Jinping trained as a chemical engineer), they're not.

The world has changed since the Apollo program was run. Small problems can quickly derail any large programme or initiative. Mazzucato refers to the Apollo I disaster in 1967, where three astronauts were burned alive during a dry run (they weren't even going to space yet at that stage). After six months of review, the programme was back on track. Contrast that with the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters, both of which grounded the space shuttles for two and a half years (and after Columbia, the programme was soon shut down). Serious mistakes early in a programme are likely to see the programme shut down. That makes the people in authority more risk averse, which is contrary to a radical, mission-oriented approach.

Having a mission-oriented economy is a bold vision, and an attractive one. We could start today. Some countries and governments have already started. But before we get too far, we're going to have to tackle with the fundamental problems that a mission-oriented approach will face. I liked this book, and it made me think. I do recommend it, but as a starting point for thinking about how we can do things better.