Mariana Mazzucato

Well, I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding that just because government's spending a lot of money, investing a lot of money, whether it's the IRA or the next gen EU two trillion recovery plan in Europe, that that means that industrial strategy is back or that government is being really strategic.

It depends.

And I mean, that's the whole point, right?

You know, how are we actually framing it?

Is it just a lot of tax incentives?

Are we focused too much on sectors?

To what degree is industrial strategy actually helping to create a more inclusive, sustainable, innovation-driven economy?

Or is it just another wave of handouts and subsidies to particular sectors?

And then we end up socializing risks and privatizing rewards.

And also, I mean, I used to joke that the US government has always had an industrial strategy, but pretended not to.

And they've always talked the Jefferson talk, but acted the Hamilton talk or the Hamiltonian kind of more proactive government strategy.

But by pretending that wasn't there, they kept a lot of things under the radar.

And the joke bit is just that finally people understood what the hell I was talking about because of the musical, before the musical came out.

Anyway, so I think that's really important to recognize that industrial strategy has always been there, except that in certain phases, including now in some countries,

It's not really strategy in terms of being driven by public purpose, which, as you said, is the title in this Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose that I direct.

It's been just kind of vertical strategies focused on sectors, technologies, types of firms.

Right.

The whole focus on small, medium enterprises.

Right.

So what I've been trying to do is to say, stop focusing on sectors, technologies, and firms, focus on big problems, right?