Professor Mariana Mazzucato

One of the reasons I really liked it is it really complemented what I had been saying for a while, decade by decade.

If you look at his curve, what happens from the 1970s onwards in terms of inequality rising, I can tell you exactly what the narrative and the story was about wealth creation and innovation.

in the UK and the US that, how do you say, exacerbated the inequality.

For example, it was actually Blair's government which reduced the time that private equity had to be invested from 10 years to two years in order to get this massive capital gains tax reduction.

That's not just tax, right?

That's capital gains tax, which if you get it right, you can foster either long-termism or short-termism.

What they did was foster more short-termism.

You have, again, many pharmaceutical companies, not just Pfizer, having lobbied governments for big R&D tax incentives or what's called the patent box, which I think is one of the stupidest policies ever because patents are already a 17-year monopoly.

that the state gives to the private sector.

There's no reason for economic incentives that the state should also then reduce the tax on a 17-year monopoly profit.

And yet, they lobbied for this in this wonderful way of talking about the story of how important they were to the innovation process.

So my work, right, we all work together.

I can't solve all the world's problems.

My work, the kind of value added of my work was to highlight, first of all, how value is actually created collectively and then how the narrative, the framing and the theory goes wrong when we don't recognize that, which is then used to lobby for the wealth to be skewed in terms of how it's distributed.

So we socialize risks, privatize rewards.

So first we need to show how the risks were socialized, sector by sector, country by country, and then show how the rewards then were not as social as the risk taken.

And I can tell you that in every decade that they've plotted their figures, like where a lot of the lobbying went.

For example, in the US, the National Venture Capital Association lobbied for capital gains to fall by 50% in four years with this narrative about the innovation economy.

So, of course, we need to get the taxes right.

And there's a whole chapter on which taxes, wealth tax, land tax, capital gains, corporate, personal income tax.