Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy
Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy , New York: PublicAffairs, 2018, 384 pages, ISBN 978-161039675-2
1 Mariana Mazzucato’s book, The Value of Everything. Making and Taking in the Global Economy , is an ambitious and much needed attempt to reintroduce the topic of value to the ongoing discussions on the current state of capitalist economies and societies, mainly in Europe and in the US. Mazzucato argues that phenomena ranging from the financialization of the economy to the disproportionate rewards accruing to the assets management industry, from the enormous prices of some pharmaceuticals (e.g. those against cancer) to the tendency of shareholders to only care about short-term rewards of stock-exchange companies, are all a manifestation of one same fundamental idea: that market price reflects an economic value. She traces the history of this idea, from its emergence in the neoclassical theory of value which equates the value of goods and services with a price which is paid for them during market transactions, to its ultimately widespread presumption in economic theorizing and in public policy practices such as measuring GDP. This basic idea has spread, however, without economists and policy-makers recognizing the morally, socially and politically dubious consequences of presuming it. Mazzucato thus claims that we need to bring value theory back to economics, as well as to public debates about economics and economy.
2 In particular, Mazzucato draws her readers’ attention to the fact that in these debates, it is not clear how value extraction and value production are understood. She defines value extraction as “the appropriation of gains vastly out of proportion to economic contribution” (2), whereas value production is the creation of “new” goods or services, as opposed to extraction, which rather moves existing goods and services around (6-8). Mazzucato believes that in order to steer growth in advanced economies, one needs to return to conceptualizing value creation and value extraction and demarcate between productive and unproductive (extractive) economic activities.
