Mariana Mazzucato, rockstar economist
Mariana Mazzucato is pouring me a glass of wine. I am chewing a slightly stale piece of home-made bread, slathered in a green sauce of parsley, garlic, oil, anchovies and egg. The warmth of an open Aga wafts across her kitchen. Minutes earlier we were crying together in the living room over a personal story she shared, which I promised not to print. It’s a little after 11 in the morning.
After this, Mazzucato has meetings with Ed Miliband’s energy department, the World Health Organisation’s chief economist, and her own team at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), which she founded, at University College London. I’m having a drink, she’s not. Swiping past 32 unread chats on WhatsApp, she shows me a group chat called “Diary” itemising each of these events in a daily morning message. She’s already behind schedule, and was before she opened the fridge. On the table in front of us is a spreadsheet calendar for 2026, printed on A3. The first row of each day denotes Mazzucato’s location: Brazil, Barbados, Spain, in quick succession. The professional life of a rock-star economist, optimised and colour-coded.
The Mazzucato family convenes around this table every night, and has done ever since the children were able to sit up straight. It gets set properly, with candles and wine, and, hours later, when they’re finished talking and eating, they clean up together. It’s also where Mazzucato writes her books: a crucible of ideas and sauces. They live in a big house in London’s Kentish Town, one where you can’t see the walls: mosaics of photographs and art cover every inch that’s not taken up by bookshelves. In the entrance hall the first thing you notice is a pink neon sign – hanging next to a Palestinian flag – that could be mistaken for a Tracey Emin. “The Value of Everything” is spelled out, each word in the handwriting of one of Mazzucato’s four children. It was a 50th birthday present from her husband, the Italian film producer Carlo Cresto-Dina. Black-and-white photographs adorn the opposite wall. “And that’s the Pope,” Mazzucato says, nodding to a print of her shaking Francis’s hand. Later, when I ask to see more of her art collection, she shows me upstairs. There, among the family photographs, is a photo of the King giving her a CBE. “I can’t believe I’m showing you my bedroom,” she says, ushering me out. “At least my husband is in the house.”
For nearly two decades the Western centre left has existed in an oddly depleted intellectual condition. The old neoliberal settlement lost legitimacy after the 2008 financial crisis, but no consensus ever fully arrived to replace it. A politics once organised around redistribution increasingly found itself reduced to management: fiscal rules, institutions, process. This, in part, explains Mazzucato’s rise. She offers something contemporary centre-left politics badly craves – not just policies, but a story about what governments are for.
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Her ideas now influence how millions of people are governed. She was directly consulted in the formulation of Joe Biden’s CHIPS Act, a stimulus package worth $280bn. The World Bank’s mission to connect 250 million sub-Saharan Africans to electricity is pure Mazzonomics. And it’s not just the centre left drawing on her work. The Trump administration’s 10 per cent stake in Intel has made the US government one of the chipmaker’s largest shareholders. “He’s taking bits of The Entrepreneurial State,” she says, namechecking her 2013 book. But “other bits were completely ignored. The bit where I talk about socialisation of risk and socialisation of rewards is critical: you can’t just have an entrepreneurial state taking the risk, investing, and not then making sure that the citizens who paid for it, through their tax, benefit too.”
And the “missions” which Keir Starmer launched in opposition and then codified in Labour’s 2024 election manifesto? He drew on her 2021 book Mission Economy. Yet it wasn’t long after Labour came to power that she realised: “Guys, you misunderstood what missions are. Growth is not the mission. Growth is the result. Missions can’t just be completely top-down, technocratic, otherwise you kill innovation.” (Mazzucato knows Starmer personally and they’ve bumped into each other at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium.)
There is a persistent narrative that the social-democratic left has not just run out of ideas but is so intellectually deficient that it is actively ushering in the radical right. In Britain, that narrative is a justification for attempting to defenestrate the Prime Minister. Over the past few months I have interviewed Mazzucato a number of times, to understand what a progressive economic agenda might look like, and whether it’s capable of crushing the populists.
One afternoon, I met Mazzucato in her office at the IIPP, which is dominated by a large table with 20-odd chairs around it. We talked about Pope Francis. A photo of him is on the wall, above a painted cloth placard from one of London’s anti-Brexit marches. “That’s a different one from the one I have at home,” she says of the photo. “I met him like, five times.” The former pope referenced Mazzucato’s work so often – in speeches, a book, and even an encyclical (a papal letter intended to articulate Catholic doctrine and shape global debate) – that he would joke that she owed him royalties. “I made you famous in Argentina,” he told her.
Mazzucato says she doesn’t know if she’s religious. Her husband is, so he accompanied her to her final meeting with Francis before his death. Mazzucato made the mistake of thinking Carlo would be grateful for introducing him to the voice of God on Earth. She shows me a video of their interaction on her phone. The two men touch hands, Carlo looks at the pope and says: “I want to go straight to heaven, I’ve already done purgatory with this one,” and motions toward Mazzucato. His Holiness responds with a prayer: “God, you gave me my infancy. You took it away. God, you gave me my youth. You took it away. God, you gave me my wife. I’m waiting.” Mazzucato puts the phone down and looks at me. “I was like, dude, what the fuck?’”
Her new book, The Common Good Economy: A New Compass, enters explicitly political territory in a way her previous work did not. “All these sexy words like open innovation, collective intelligence, problem-oriented this, that, the other – that assumes we know how to work together, right? But first of all, if I don’t value you, I think you’re shit, I’m probably not gonna work very well with you. So how do we value each other?”
The new project is less a break with her earlier writing than an attempt to provide it with a moral and political theory. The Entrepreneurial State argued that governments create markets rather than merely correcting them; Mission Economy argued states should actively direct economies towards collective goals; 2023’s The Big Con catalogued what happens when governments outsource, well, everything. But Mazzucato thinks those ideas were too easily reduced to managerial slogans. Politicians loved the language of “missions”, she says, while ignoring the institutional transformation they actually require. You can’t have a mission-oriented economy, she concluded, if the economic relationships underlying it are still parasitic and structured around the old assumptions. The new book is an attempt to answer a more basic question: what is the economy for, and how should people relate to one another inside it? The answer is what she calls a “common-good economy”. Instead of seeing the state as a reluctant fixer of problems created elsewhere, she wants governments, businesses, workers and citizens to collaborate around the explicitly social goals that they have already agreed and set: decarbonisation, public health, reducing inequality, technological sovereignty. “This book is about how to achieve [those goals],” she says. “How to fight the fight.”
What distinguishes this from standard centre-left industrial policy is Mazzucato’s insistence that the process matters as much as the outcome. A government cannot announce a mission from above and subcontract delivery to consultants and corporations. The relationships built along the way – between state and business, labour and capital, citizens and institutions – determine whether growth is “good growth” or merely another rigged system dressed in progressive language. “If you had the same therapist your whole life and you’re not getting better,” she says, “you should probably change your therapist.”
That helps explain why the book is preoccupied with the collapse of trust in liberal democracies. Mazzucato repeatedly returns to the idea that populist revolts are rooted not simply in economic stagnation but in humiliation and exclusion: people feeling governed at rather than involved. “A lot of the people here who voted for Brexit – and in Italy, Meloni, and the US, Trump – they’re not stupid,” she says. “They have been massively failed. Even in the red states which received most of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act support, they voted for Trump. Why? The economy was kind of working there, and yet they still didn’t believe. They didn’t feel part of something. They didn’t feel valued.”
Her answer is “co-creation”. The language can resemble academic jargon, but beneath it sits a fairly radical argument about power: that decision-making and its benefits, as well as its risks, should be shared between governments and their people. She cites forest ecosystems, indigenous philosophies and the “wood wide web” of interconnected trees as examples. Critics might find this airy, but it reflects Mazzucato’s core intellectual shift: replacing the economic image of isolated competition with one of interdependence. Economies are systems of social relationships, she says, which should be consciously organised around collective goals. It’s about redefining the relationship between democracy and capitalism itself. One of Mazzucato’s “favourite examples” of this is the Bolsa Verde, or green grant, which provides direct payments to indigenous people in the Amazon for environmental work already being done. “The Amazon workers are like, ‘You know what, dude? We don’t need your little redistribution. Pay us to do the innovation that we’ve been doing for 500 years.” Collaboration is not a decorative extra to her theory but its democratic core.
This is what makes Mazzucato such a compelling figure to governments searching for post-neoliberal language. She offers a theory of capitalism that is moral, managerial and patriotic; radical enough to sound transformative, pragmatic enough to sit comfortably inside state institutions. Whether that synthesis can survive contact with increasingly volatile politics, a worsening economy and human self-interest is an open question.
For all Mazzucato’s influence, there remains a slight unreality to the world she describes. Everyone collaborates. Institutions learn. Businesses align with public purpose. The market is “shaped”. The state becomes entrepreneurial, strategic, participatory and morally ambitious all at once. Not everyone is convinced. Her critics, the harshest of which come from the right or from within global corporations, hear her ideas and do not see democratic renewal but a kind of managerial utopianism. Where Mazzucato sees governments hollowed out by privatisation and outsourcing, public-choice theorists see bureaucracies driven by self-preservation, power accumulation and distorted incentives. To them, “mission-oriented policy” risks being a euphemism for corporate subsidy regimes captured by politically connected firms.
A recent newsletter by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank that sponsored the Great Barrington Declaration (a widely publicised demand for the easing of Covid-19 lockdowns), accused Mazzucato of offering “free lunches”, surmising that “basic economic understanding and research are of no relevance to [her]”. The Institute of Economic Affairs, incubator of Liz Truss’s grand designs, has bemoaned Andy Burnham’s adherence to “the Mazzucato playbook”.
Others think the problem is deeper than competence. Mazzucato’s “common good” assumes societies can agree on shared objectives. But modern democracies are fractured precisely because people disagree, fundamentally and irreconcilably, about what the common good is. Liberal theorists from Hayek to Rawls worried about states becoming too morally ambitious, imposing collective visions through institutions that inevitably privilege some interests over others.
There is also a more practical critique, which she would perhaps acknowledge: her ideas have influenced governments across the world, and those governments have not obviously delivered her vision. The gap between the idea and its implementation is not a new problem in politics. But it does raise a question that The Common Good Economy gestures at without fully answering: if the concepts are right, and the politicians are willing, and the frameworks are in place – and yet it still doesn’t work – at what point does the theory need to account for its failure? “That’s why I set up the Institute [at UCL],” she says. “We tell government when it’s not working, fighting against the old industrial strategy… That’s the nature of being an academic: you should be a thorn in the side.”
When I asked Mazzucato about her public opponents, she didn’t raise the usual suspects – forthright libertarians or disgruntled Marxists – as I had expected. She instead mentioned blog posts from the 2010s from the Blair/Brown-era power broker Geoff Mulgan, who was, once upon a time, Mazzucato’s peer. Mulgan, now also a professor at UCL, “might’ve taken it down because it was quite embarrassing for him”. I checked: he hadn’t. Under the headline “Public Intellectuals and the Vanity Trap”, Mulgan wrote “the risk is that many of the brightest intellectuals… find themselves so much in demand, called upon to repeat their best speeches again and again, or to offer soundbites on news programmes, that they are left with very little time to think”. Mazzucato was hurt by the “weird and personal” attack, but she was also busy and her kids were young. “I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’” she says. “I wanted to be in bed.”
As her public profile has grown over the years, so too have the number of critics. Some focus on her ideas; others direct their energy elsewhere. The most recent example of the jeopardy in being a woman who thinks publicly came a just a few weeks before the release of The Common Good Economy. Mazzucato received the first copy from the publishers. The cover’s background colour, a cobalt blue, matched her toenail polish, so she took a photo of the two together and posted it on X. In a more innocent world, one that does not host WikiFeet and where a billionaire has not turned up the filth dial on his social media platform to 11, this post may have passed by without much notice. But our world includes the Photographing Something You Want to Show Everyone meme, popularised on 4chan, and its misogynistic punchline: women (vain, disgusting, needy) will use any opportunity to include their bodies in a picture. Her tweet has been viewed nearly a million times.
“I was sort of hoping people would forget that,” Mazzucato says when I ask her about it a few weeks later. “The funny thing is that I was so naive, and I don’t care, I really think there’s bigger problems in life than this. And, unfortunately,” she deflects, joking, “I also took the picture three weeks after the pedicure.” She is more comfortable talking broadly. “If you are a woman, you’re progressive, you’re out there, talking about your work and governments listen – oof, that’s gonna be a great punching bag. But I don’t really care about that.” I almost believe her.
Mariana Mazzucato knows the good life. She swims almost daily. Nearly everyone I talk to about her asks if I’ve been invited to dinner, if I’ve sat at the table. She will bake at least three focaccias in any given week, and dish them out: to the bloke who runs the corner shop, to a friend, to me with a side of green sauce.
“Don’t lose hope and, actually, economics really matters,” she tells me as she begins one of her characteristic crescendos. “The book is trying to provoke economists to rethink their own understanding of good, [and] young people to not give up, and definitely politicians too.” Speaking with her, spending time with her, it’s hard not to be energised, difficult to remain a cynic. Why can’t things be better? Shouldn’t they be?
In Venice, drinking a little glass of wine in the morning is called l’ombretta – little shadow. “It’s a beautiful tradition,” Mazzucato tells me on the morning of our first meeting, “to take the edge off.” I leave her house and walk out into the birdsong, towards the Audis parked along the street. In the centre of her front garden, past the olive trees and tulips, there’s a lemon tree. Bought in Camden Garden Centre, for many years it didn’t bear fruit until the family, and the tree, briefly moved to Italy. That year it produced so many lemons they could make limoncello. And now, in this corner of Kentish Town, it continues to fruit. It’s not even midday. I have a little buzz.
The Common Good Economy: A New Compass by Mariana Mazzucato is out now (Allen Lane)
Listen to Mariana Mazzucato in conversation with Oli Dugmore on our interview podcast The Exchange
[Further reading: How Britain lost control]
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