Mariana Mazzucato

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

Thrilled to finally have you on.

Great to be here.

Well, first of all, I'm here also because the government of Spain is really kind of leading the way in many areas that I'm very interested in, especially the kind of new economic thinking that needs to underpin how we rethink government.

And so I was meeting with both the prime minister and the minister for the economy, Carlos Cuerpo, who I'm on a panel today with.

about a council that we've just set up.

It's called the Global Council for a Common Good Economy.

Anyway, and besides that, I'm also here to speak at the Bloomberg City Labs event about this new public sector capability index that we've been developing with them as a partner, which is really about reinvesting inside the civil service so that they can really tackle those wicked complex problems instead of hiring Deloitte during COVID and giving them 1.5 million a day to do test and trace, which they failed at in the UK.

Right.

Well, I'm actually quite lucky that my books actually get read by the prime minister.

So usually what happens is that they've, especially the entrepreneurial state, which I wrote in 2013, that had quite a bit of an effect here.

They even wrote a report called El Estado Emprendedor en España.

And they really want to

asked me, what does that mean?

What does it mean for actually even being able to fail, for example, right?

So venture capitalists are always bragging about all the failures that they had in order to get a success, whereas as soon as a civil servant or a minister fails or a prime minister fails, front page of the papers.

So they're very interested in the kind of narrative change, but also, well, the cultural change, but especially the theoretical

underpinning within, say, a finance ministry or an economics ministry that needs to then accompany rethinking government.

Because otherwise, if you continue to have the old economic models where we judge things by cost-benefit analysis, net present value, all these really static metrics, we would have never even bothered going to the moon, okay, first of all, in the 1960s had we thought of it as a cost-benefit calculation.

And so what should replace that, right?