hello everybody and welcome and uh you're not so numerous but you're numerous enough to listen to a meeting which will uh focus on some fundamental issues and we will talk about these issues together with mariana marzuccato well mariana matsukato just a few words to introduce her and then she will make her speech and then we will have the opportunity to make some questions so mariano matsukato teaches economy of innovation at a ucl where she she is at the head of the institute for public person purpose and she's an expert in the relationship between public and private and she is a counselor for many governments and she has focused a lot about this issue the issue of the presence of the state and its relationship with the economy with the market in this past few years after the financial disaster of 2008 we have realized that the state can be a problem solver a facilitator something an engine or an infrastructure which can help the market re-emerge and come back so a state that now should not interfere with these strategies and with the missions and i used this word on purpose because in her book mission economy a guy to change a capitalism a mission is not a neutral world it's not just a word taken from our common language it it makes reference to the ability to plan in the long term and implement things in the long term in order to reach objectives which should also be long-term mission as mariana matucanto uses it in her book is a word which is in contrast with the disease of our times which is a short-term mission that is the obsession of a short-term is which affects uh politics but also the economy and think of for example investors who very often just look at the short term and not at the long term now in order to correct all these problems and modify this idea that comes from the 80s from the thatcher and reagan times well for some years now there has been a debate about this and mariana matsukanto had already published a book with uh later on this new relationship between public and private sector so this uh book is not just a book about the economy it's called the mission economy but it's a guide also to change the political life to change politics so that politics takes back its role that is the role of defining the uh the objectives for the whole community so welcome mariana matzucato at the end of her lecture it will be possible to make questions mariana speaks perfect italian but she will speak in english so when you make questions we will not have to wait for the time of translation mariana mantucato is focus on the fact that we should go beyond ideology we need to go beyond the dichotomy state versus market and in fact we need to unpick the words what kind of state and the market itself the word the market is often confused with business and i'm going to try to not do that i will speak about business in the state and markets as outcomes of how we organize public institutions how we organize private institutions of which there's many many problems in fact many large corporates are talking about the problems within the private sector so the interrelationship between public private but also the other actors in the economy which includes civil society organizations like trade unions all these different governance issues and interrelationships we could call it ecosystem issues determine the kind of market we get determine the kind of economy we get so let's just forget the word market versus state let's talk about the granularity of what kind of state what kind of business and what kind of interrelationship we actually need between public and private and i won't talk much about civil society institutions but let's all just remember that without trade unions we wouldn't have the weekends we wouldn't have the eight-hour work day we would still have children working in factories so you know the labor movement and labor unions got us the kind of civilized as opposed to barbaric economy in some cases we still have a barbaric economy anyway has helped to shape the economy we have today so really what we're talking about is market shaping market creating and what can we learn from and that'll be the key part of my lecture what can we learn from what happened 51 years ago when humans actually managed to get to the moon and back because that was the mission it was not just to go to the moon uh and back what did it actually mean for intra-organizational governance what did it mean for inter-organizational relationships and believe me i know like everyone knows that the social challenges we have today are so much harder in some ways than getting to the moon because they are deeply social political behavioral challenges but given that we still have this ideology that the state is not able the state cannot invest at best the state can set the rules of the game fix market failures then please get the hell out of the way actually it is important to even look at the moon landing and ask what did it mean to be purpose driven what did it mean to have metrics that were actually based on objectives right and to allow all the dynamic spillovers to happen along the way what did it mean to take seriously the partnership with business as opposed to just talk about being business friendly or commercialization opportunities so these are the issues i want to draw out and also of course step back and say that the challenges we have that are you know beneath the sustainable development goals are much much harder than getting to the moon they are so-called wicked challenges requiring all sorts of other changes not just technological and organizational so you know this lecture is of course happening in the midst of the covet 19 moment and that's why unfortunately i'm speaking to you on video because had i come to trento which i love i would have had to quarantine 10 days when i returned and i have four children and a complex life as we all do and i would not have been able to quarantine ten days anyway so this lecture is happening in the midst of this moment where we have globally realized how unprepared we are right we were not able globally during the first phase of kobe 19 to deliver even the basic basic things like personal protection equipment to frontline workers who we've called essential workers but we continue in many countries of the world not to value these essential workers we don't pay them the proper wage we don't properly fund our global health systems had this pandemic actually begun in africa not in china we would all be globally worse off right it's a it's a pandemic by definition we have to go at it together and you know health systems in many parts of the world including in many african countries continue to be extremely weak but also many developed economies i live in the uk where we've unfortunately been experiencing cuts to our public health system to the point that just six months before covid 19 hit the doctors were all on strike junior doctors and junior nurses were on strike because they were not well they felt they were not working within a system that was being valued right and then during cover 19 we sit on our steps and we clap essential workers but this is a wake up moment are we actually valuing these very systems we realize are absolutely critical but we also woke up to the fact that we had a huge digital divide i have four children and they during lockdown continue to have access to their human right to education one of the sustainable development goals but so many children again in both developed and developing countries did not given the lack of broadband connection the lack of different types of digital technologies in their households where they were locked down the test and trace system failed in so many different parts of the world i live in the uk where we managed to outsource the test and trace system to deloitte one of the consulting companies that has been actually benefiting in many ways from all sorts of different crises not because it's their fault but because state capacity is so weak that it ends up outsourcing its brain to different types of private companies with which it should be of course partnering but you don't outsource your brain you can outsource certain things but not the fundamental things that are required to actually govern an economy and govern a crisis and the vaccine again very ill prepared it's not enough to have a vaccine and we do have a vaccine different vaccines or six different variations out there because of enormous public and private investments over 12 billion dollars have been spent by governments many billions have been spent by the private sector but it's a health pandemic what's the point of having a vaccine if 80 of the world doesn't get vaccinated it doesn't make any sense so both in terms of the solidarity that's required but also in terms of how we govern innovation right we shouldn't forget that growth and innovation have not just a rate but a direction how we govern growth how we govern innovation matters and so the fact we still have intellectual property rights being some ways let me just be really frank abused uh becoming instruments for rent seeking as opposed to value creation patents are often too wide too strong too upstream too long you know we actually right now need a patent pool or in some cases a patent waiver patents are brevdy in italian um and that would allow us to have at this moment right now collective intelligence right which is what we need we need to be sharing our understanding sharing our knowledge not just of the vaccine but all the different tools and therapies that are required at the moment we don't have that so big summary of my first slide and i promise to go quicker is we're not prepared we're not prepared for crises we're not prepared for pandemics and it has to be a wake-up moment and of course this crisis happened on the back of other crises the climate crisis the financial crisis and so on and for the climate crisis as well we have not been prepared we needed a 16 year old from sweden greta tornberg who's done us all a great service to kind of slap us in the face and say what do you do when your house is on fire do you sit there and debate should i go out should i stay in what do i need what no you get out and we're not getting out of the climate crisis at the speed that the scientists are telling us that the ipcc report told us in 2019 when we were globally told you got 10 years left what are you going to do so you know since then we continue to subsidize too much fossil fuel companies we even during the cobia 19 recovery funds allowed them to be allocated to energy companies that have been to too much still focus on fossil fuel projects and you'll know from uh last week or was it the week before that exxon has just gone through a big revamp of its uh aboard after the uh uh climate uh um activists took over at least two seats on the board because of that lack of movement that we actually are currently seeing so we are not moving fast enough and one of the things i have been arguing for a very long time in the books that pietro was kindly um you know citing in both the entrepreneurial state lost innovator the value of everything and the recent book is that we have the wrong kind of policy we have the wrong kind of private sector as well by the way and i'm not going to talk too much about that given the time but i my previous book was all about that we have a private sector that is too short-termist is too financialized over 4 trillion dollars have been spent in the last 10 years by the s p 500 companies just in buying back their shares to boost stock prices stock options and executive pay and you know that requires a whole change in corporate governance but what i'll argue also during the talk is that that doesn't happen on its own we need notions of stakeholder governance and purpose to go to the center of the system to how all the different actors work together to deliver the outcomes we need but in terms of this slide here and what i've been arguing in my previous books is we need a different type of state it's simply not true that we need more state or the state is back and big state big budgets big debt big deficit we need a fundamentally different type of public actor driven by public purpose what i will very soon be calling missions public missions um and actually hold itself accountable to that um and unfortunately even from the economic theory perspective we have framed the role of government at best as fixing market failures at worst you have reagan that's this beautiful picture here factor saying please get out of the way you know what did thatcher say if you find yourself on a public bus you're a loser you know obviously something's wrong with you right so that's like one extreme but the other extreme is yes of course we need the state it's there to fix problems in the economy it's there to literally fill a gap by what the private sector doesn't do even the concept of the public good which sounds good two words one of which is good is framed in terms of filling the gap of something the private sector is not doing because of positive externalities around things like research and development clean water defense systems these are public goods that the state invests in because the private sector doesn't or negative externalities like pollution state comes in and imposes something like a carbon tax we don't have it by the way so it's still a good thing to do but well what i argue is it's not enough different types of other failures like asymmetric information so small companies are not getting the loans they need state comes in with sme finance now all these market failures do exist it is actually quite a useful concept to think about markets and they fail and what the state has to do but the problem is you do not transform a system through bandaging it up you literally are just bandaging it up it's a short-term solution what if you actually want to transform a system what if you want a greener economy a more inclusive economy what if you actually cared about the sustainable development goals that every country from italy uganda brazil united states signed up to in 2015 can you actually fix your way towards solving those goals i believe the answer is no and it doesn't mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater let's keep that framework but it also means we need on top of that to have a market shaping a market co-creating perspective of policy and it's also important to think about what are the tools that you need inside government to do that and this picture here of uh lord agnew he's a tory so he's a conservative politician in the uk government he said something so interesting that i've been repeating to myself and to others he said that what he observed in brexit and during covet 19 was that the uk government had outsourced its brain to the big four companies kpmg mckinsey deloitte and so on and that this was infantilizing this is the word i use now infantilizing the public sector right if you're not investing within your own capacity to govern and to partner you know governing also means partnering with other actors including not only business if you're not investing in your capacity to do so you become stupid you actually become dependent on those very fill the gappers uh uh entities and particularly on consultants and i know in italy this has been also in the front pages where the the recovery scheme itself to some extent has been outsourced to mckinsey um and so one of the really important things is if we need a stronger more dynamic more agile more flexible state what are the capabilities the capacity we need within state institutions to deliver for citizens that actually vote on the politicians we have so this is in no way a defense of the state something that always comes back to me and i'm like no listen actually read the book don't just stop at the title you know what is the kind of state we need what is the kind of capacity capability intra-organizational culture design of the tools from procurement grants loans and so on that we need in order to actually confront the challenges that we have today which i always go back to have to be the sustainable development goals around poverty around hunger around climate change around all sorts of different issues including gender parity but if we're not investing within that capacity we have a problem and so the reason i looked at the apollo program was not to say that today's challenges are like going to the moon you know believe me it's not that easy i know that you know that but there is something about the questions that nasa asked itself when it set that goal back in 1962 you know what did it mean to actually welcome experimentation welcome the difficulty you know kennedy's speech was so clear he said we need to go to the moon because it's hard not because it's easy i mean imagine if we spoke like that about climate change we're going to do it because it's hard we're going to do it and it's going to cost a huge amount of money which he said it would cost he was careful to say less than what we spend on cigars and cigarettes but it's hard it's worth it you know to be honest what he was thinking about was beat the russians you know sputnik cold war but you know at the time that was their kind of wartime military challenge but he set a very specific goal he didn't just stop at beat the russians right today we can't stop that fight climate change what does it actually mean on the ground what is the goal what is the metric what is the timeline that we're going to do it in and if we're not going to do it like that we're going to you know basically not do it it's not going to be a serious plan there'll be no investment strategy there'll be no innovation strategy and when he gave those famous speeches at rice stadium in congress also in front of the irish parliament he you know he was quite clear and you know this also came out in different speeches not just his own they had no idea how to go they really had to experiment there was different ways to get there and back and they finally landed on this lunar orbit rendezvous but this idea that the public sector not only has to be kind of ambitious and do inspirational things but experiment learning by doing trial and error and error and error and there were many errors in fact you'll know that there was a very large error um around the apollo 1 fire where three astronauts lost their lives and just before dying gus grissom one of those three astronauts in 1967 said jesus christ you know how the hell are we going to get to the moon if we can't even talk between two or three buildings because he couldn't hear what was being said to him by the mission control room and there was like you know different things going on there is very little actually horizontal communication and anyone who you know speaks to government officials or or those who work with them will know that this is a constant critique today that every department works within its silo there's no proper proper sorry joined up thinking and so what that mission did of getting to the moon and back and the trial and error and error and error that happened along the way was create a real kind of recognition within nasa that they themselves needed to change the public sector the state needed to change in order to be and so um george mueller who came in from bell labs a very innovative private sector innovation agency which by the way i'll just say it now because i'll forget to later came about in an era where the state was much more confident because bell labs came about from the state imposing conditions on a t telecoms company to reinvest its profits back into the economy in order to maintain its monopoly status and to reinvest in such a way that actually led to innovation big innovation beyond telecoms bell labs very famous all over the world if you haven't read it read the dream factory george mueller came from bell labs into nasa and helped nasa change its organization to have project managers who each had a team and would be in constant communication with each other so that kind of flexible dynamic horizontal communication which is incredibly important with any mission not just going to the moon you want government departments to actually be working creatively dynamically horizontally together and the other thing is you know nasa and this is again very important for modern day missions it was not just aeronautics it was nutrition electronics material innovation um software the whole software industry in some ways could be seen as a spillover from this particular mission many different companies small medium and large took part and many spillovers happened along the way the goal was getting to the moon but because it was organized in that flexible dynamic way because there were strong linkages between science and industry lots of things happened along the way camera phones athletic shoes home insulation foil blankets scratch resistant lenses these are just examples of different things that happen along the way in los tate novatore i talked about how everything that makes our iphone smart internet gps touch screen siri are similarly spillovers from different types of public missions which allowed the private sector to come in and do great things so the internet was a solution to a problem that darpa at the time in the in back in the day when the arpanet was first getting invested in set itself the problem that darpa had with the internet that it set itself was how do we get the satellites to communicate the internet was an answer to that gps was the answer to the navy's problem of how to know very precisely where all the ships were in the sea so this purpose-oriented public sector that sets itself problems at the time wartime problems today these should be the sdg kinds of problems can really foster lots of bottom-up innovation but not by saying we need business bring in business no by saying we need to solve problems and business come in help us so instead of picking winners deciding already which technology which sector which firm we need to be picking the willing right thinking of what the problems are and then redesigning those tools on the ground to really catalyze as much um investment innovation experimentation and trial and error from all the different actors and also what i found so interesting in the kind of research for the book was reading what the people inside nasa were saying so you know they wanted to partner with business they knew they had to but with a purpose right so they had a goal but then they left open the how but they designed the contracts properly which i don't think we do today you know the green deal the green listen to the scientists as greta says the deal that's a social contract we need to go back to you know the the kind of legal basis beneath the contracts which is currently i think in many countries setting us up to fail in italy many of the contracts and the relationships between public and private are not symbiotic they're not parasit sorry they're not mutualistic they're often parasitic you know it rains down subsidies guarantees to do what to stay in place so what was interesting with nasa is they changed the procurement contracts to be not cost plus but fixed price there was a goal there was a prize the fixed price but then there was constant incentives for innovation and investment you got extra if you did really well and they also designed into the contracts no excess profits in other words if we're going to do this together let's not make this a gambling casino as i would argue spaces today with elon musk who's received 5 billion billion dollars from the us government for his three companies but it's on the back of a massive public infrastructure the international space station and so on and yet it's it's talked about as you know private entrepreneurship elon musk a genius i'm sure he is a genius but you know it's on the back of a collective ecosystem of private and public and how do we actually share the rewards given that collective nature and nasa actually cared about that i found that fascinating another thing i found fascinating was that ernest brackett the head of procurement in nasa was very aware of the problem that lord agnew in that previous slide talked about he said if we don't invest in our own brain in our own capacity our own capabilities we will get captured by what he called bro shermanship because at the time they didn't have power points like i have today or this cartoon has here they had brochures you know companies would bring in their sexy little brochures and say oh we can help you he said you know we want to work with the top companies the best companies not the ones that have the nicest brochures but if we become stupid if we stop investing in our own brain our own capacity our own capability we won't even know who to partner with we won't know how to write the terms of reference and guess what i think that's the situation we have today in many public administrations who overly outsource their brain and so you know the key point of the second half of the book is well you know what limits us today if we're interested in the 17 sustainable development goals which in theory we are and not not because i say we are but because every country has basically signed up to them there's 169 targets beneath them and we are not getting any closer to achieving them hence you know my early points when i was saying that we are unprepared and i really believe that one of the ways that's not the only way to get serious about them is in fact to apply that kind of moonshot thinking but not by just bake you know making big projects that are you know just the pet project of a minister or of a ceo whether it's bill gates or a minister of the environment but really to have that kind of purpose-oriented approach towards the sdgs that allow us to redesign our policies whether it's innovation policy industrial strategy procurement policy to bring in as many different actors in the system public private non-profit but especially in the business community as many different sectors like it took to get to the moon nutrition electronics materials software to solve each and one of the different problems we have but it's not going to happen without a strong government it's not going to happen without talking about growth as a direction more inclusive and sustainable growth the market alone business alone does not get the sustainable growth but so how do you actually have goals but keeping quite open on the how how do you redesign those procurements policies like ernest brackett did so on the back of some of this thinking some years ago i wrote a report for the european commission around thinking in this mission-oriented way specifically at the time for its innovation policy where i said stop making these false lists of sectors technologies firms like smes small medium enterprises start thinking of the problems you have start with the sustainable development goals those are the challenges they're not missions or challenges broad like beating the russians was turn them into missions as concrete as getting to the moon and back in a generation get as many different sectors so you're not just allowing one sector to benefit in a parasitic way and redesign those grants loans procurement to foster that bottom-up innovation that we require amongst all different organizations especially but not only in the business community so whether it's sdg sorry this is reversed here should be 13 for clean oceans no sorry it's 13 for climate change 14 for clean oceans that's correct turning these sdgs into specific targets like a plastic free ocean like a hundred carbon neutral cities in europe by 2030 and all the different sectors from chemicals real estate energy mobility food design waste ai so on and so forth but the trick is stop just handing out money stop reining subsidies and guarantees put conditionality at the center pick those who are willing to work with you towards actually solving these problems but keep it quite open on the how and this is you know why i helped the uk government actually under theresa may not um boyce johnson theresa may's government i worked closely with greg clark and said what would this look like if the industrial strategy of a country was not just a random list of sectors like steel you know clean or you know energy automobiles and so on but actually looking at the problems we face around clean growth aging mobility and so on what would it look like to turn these challenges which then they chose on the back of this relationship we had into missions like the future of mobility and having you know universally accessible travel creating congestion and admission free zero accident systems what would it mean for transport inclusive design robotics and ai and so on and what would it mean for the way you actually design your industrial strategy to crowd in lots of experimentation in this case including in areas like disabilities if you want 100 accessible travel in sweden what i have found really interesting and we've been working through my institute with the innovation agency called vinova in sweden they've set themselves a national mission of a carbon-free fossil-free welfare state and it lands on the structures like public transport public education public health and one of the food missions was in schools you know what if school meals pasta instead of just having procurement to random organizations that you know just get money to deliver food what if the mission was at the food level at the school level to have tasty sustainable healthy meals what if children got involved in designing those very meals but also had it throughout their curriculum but that you had also metrics to make sure the school meals were truly sustainable in terms of their entire value chain this is also something we've been working on in london through the camden renewal commission that i co-chair with the leader of camden council where i live in london where we're looking at housing estates again schools as places right place-based strategies where we implement these really strong inspirational targeted strategies like carbon neutral housing but bring citizens who live in the housing to the table to actually co-design and co-create those missions and then work backwards and say what does it mean for the budget what does it mean for procurement what does it mean for public private partnerships and so on and you know for me these questions are critical for changing how we think of policy how we think of government but also how we think of the new relationship we need between business and the state and you know business is in trouble we have lots of short-termism we have lots of financialization but luckily there's lots of leaders who have been talking about the need for change through the esg targets the sustainability targets the notions of purpose the notions of stakeholder capitalism so both larry fink and the business roundtable which you see here on the slides have over the last two years talked about the need to replace maximizing shareholder value with stakeholder value but unfortunately i don't see much change and i think that's because at best it's been a discussion within corporate governance boardrooms we need to put the notion of purpose and stakeholder value at the center of the system at the center of how all the different actors work together also how they're governed but also how they work together public private partnerships that are truly purpose oriented and you know if we can't do it with the vaccine if we can't actually govern intellectual property rights at a moment of a health pandemic to be structured in such a way that really fosters collective intelligence then we're screwed you know there's no point of talking about stakeholder value if we can't do it when we actually need it and i've been writing about this for a long time this is something that aoc has been recently talking about we actually met just before she became joined the us congress we talked about how crazy it was that the u.s government invests 40 billion dollars a year in drug innovation 75 percent of blockbusters actually trace their innovation and early the kind of high risk early stage finance for innovation to these national public institutes of health and yet the prices of the drugs don't reflect that the intellectual property rights don't reflect that so what does it mean to govern a public-private relationship with notions of public value and public purpose at the center so that prices and intellectual property rights reflect that and i'll just finish i'm almost done i was told i have 35 minutes and i'm now speaking 33 minutes so two minutes left um i think it's a great opportunity i want to end on a positive note we have a european recovery plan which in theory is conditional on governments getting their acts together so it's a public public conditionality so with the financial crisis the conditionality was that governments like greece italy spain you know goldman sachs called us the pigs pigs portugal italy spain had to cut their budget deficits in order to access the recovery that was foolish we all know austerity did not work it ironically increased debt to gdp because by having very minimal public deficits we ended up causing more problems later that we had to pick up and and then spend the public budget on so this time we have a recovery plan that's conditional on governments actually having a plan around digitalization climate change and strengthening health systems so you know that's an important moment just to signal and on the public private what's interesting is we're seeing something i haven't seen as explicit before this is the french finance minister telling renault and air france that in order to access the recovery they had to lower their carbon footprint not a bad idea we had austria and denmark telling companies if they wanted to use tax havens paradise fiscally they could not access the recovery fund it ain't rocket science we had elizabeth warren trying to convince trump trump in the care act that we shouldn't be just giving out money to companies that are excessively using share buybacks extracting value out so these conversations are being had today public public conditionality and public private and i really think it's a good moment to rethink the economics in the book the last chapter chapter 6 i look through the implications of what i talk about in the book of how we think about value markets organizations finance as outcomes focused distribution sharing both risks and rewards truly purpose-driven partnerships and the co-creation you know allowing also an open system and a co-design of the future by really bringing citizen assemblies to the center but also labor unions and other social movements to the center of this change that's required which by the way requires also a particular capability within the civil service of empathy which means listening putting yourself in other people's shoes it's not sympathy empathy um and also a whole new vocabulary this is why i set up the institute for innovation and public purpose at ucl i really think we need a new vocabulary a new framing for government policy it's not about fixing but co-creating it's not about de-risking but welcoming uncertainty it's not about picking winners but picking the willing it's definitely not about leveling the playing field but tilting it towards the direction of sustainable growth very clear but keeping open the how you can't outsource your way out of this and surely we also need better metrics you know cost benefit net present value if we had used them to go to the moon we would have never bothered going um anyway thank you so much i'm very keen now to engage uh pietro in the audience in any questions you might have i would like to stress the last passage when you mention the next generation eu and how the different european countries have interpreted their recurrent resilience plan because that allows us to identify a huge difference versus the rescuing of the economy that happened after the financial crisis of 2008 it is no longer the whatever it takes issue it is not just measures to rescue this has to be connected to the two main trends ecological transition and the digital transition which are the very heart and soul of the europe of the future that will hopefully resurrect from the pandemic i believe that this is a very important point and it can give us a reason to be optimistic viewing the present situation so this is a q a part of our meeting there's a microphone here on my left please if you have a question come and speak in the microphone thank you very much don't be shy there we can see there is already a candidate can you hear me yes we can which is a relationship in your opinion between bias towards the state towards the role of the state which unfortunately is a reality at least in some areas and the chicken economics vision that is the theory according to which if the rich become richer the whole society will benefit from this this is i believe an anachronistic vision which however i have the impression is still shared by many thank you thank you very much uh do i answer each single question well i don't know if there are any other questions i believe we can start answering with this one because it's quite a demanding question exactly so first of all thank you very much for your question and now i will switch to between the english and the italian i apologize for my bad italian so first of all as a person born in italy was always lived abroad it is very interesting to see how relevant this question is for italy italy much more than the united states much more than the uk um has this idea of the state that cannot do so the market will lead the economy and will define also the type of relationship we can have between the public and the private as well as the incentives and subsidies which are widely used in italy and now i would like to shift to english because i'm getting a little bit confused about trickle-down economics is that it actually is everywhere it's not just you know the reagan and the thatcher years anytime government focuses too much on tax incentives for business it is trickle down economics the idea is make it easier for business to do something it will do it and then the benefits will spill over will trickle down to the citizens unfortunately what we know and we've actually studied this and at least around certain types of tax incentives tax incentives alone simply increase profits they don't increase investment what many countries like in italy suffer from is lack of business investment my good friend uh luciano coutinho in brazil who was the head of the public bank in brazil like gdp in italy in brazil it's bnds he used to say brazil is capitalism without capitalists so in italy unfortunately there's many good companies i know that you know i i know many of the leaders of luxoft and elsewhere but unfortunately if you look at the data there's not enough business investment so how do you increase business investment do you just make it easier for business to invest by making it cheaper in particular areas by reducing the taxes by reducing the costs even of things like research and development or do you help lead the way you make direct investments in particular areas including a greener economy which then increases the expectations in the business community of where future opportunities lie okay and this is what i think government should be doing it should be making the difficult investments the capital-intensive high-risk ones in broadly defined areas not little projects broadly defined areas hence these kind of missions which set a whole kind of new landscape create a market which then business gets in economics we would say crowded in you know catalyzed to enter and if you only focus on trickle-down economics and different types of tax policies and tax incentives you don't achieve that so what gets hurt is innovation what gets hurt is investment and and what you increase is inequality and the best person to read this on is is warren buffett he's not a communist he's not a socialist he's i think the richest man in the world at least one of and he has often said stop reducing my tax stop reducing my capital gains tax stop reducing my corporate income tax i don't even look at it i look where i see an opportunity so a lot of what i've been talking about is how do we get smart policy not stupid policy to increase the expectations in the business community of where those opportunities lie and i look at specific countries like denmark you know not just big countries like the us or china denmark today it's a tiny country is the number one provider of high-tech green digital services to china china's spending over two trillion what is that mila media so 12 zeros so you know two trillion dollars to green its economy through every sector and denmark is servicing the digital part of that and if you look at how it achieved that it actually was through really bold missions at the city level like in copenhagen where the startup community was helped to actually serve some real important missions that the government had in terms of carbon neutrality and they scaled up their capacity precisely through these ambitious policies and then denmark benefits from that that start up and scaling up process when you have a country like china requiring those services but if you look at how they did that it was not through trickle-down economics and so just the last point i would say is in italy i think what we need to do is learn what worked in the past what is not working now what did not work in the past so if you look at edie a big state-owned enterprise in italy we shouldn't look at it like a big blob we should break it down into its history and i see three important phases in its history the first was public but not politicized and it had all sorts of the top managers wanted to work in edi it was a place that was honorable to work there and they basically achieved very difficult things like the alto strada del sol built i think in just four years or something whereas anyone who lives in milan or torino know how long that auto strada recently has taken to make anyway the second phase was public and super politicized and the third phase was privatized so the second phase and the third phase were equally disastrous just like the privatization of telecom italia was disastrous in terms of the the the cuts in the r d budget that came as part of that so it's not private or public it's how you govern the private sector to be more purpose oriented and the public sector to be public but not politicized and already in the entrepreneurial state lost and in this book i look at specific public organizations what does it mean to be public but not politicized so you know darpa brings in top people for five years to be civil servants they're very explicit they want them to take risks big bets around big public problems they are rewarded for taking risk most civil servants are penalized for making mistakes you're on the front page in the uk of the daily mail luckily in italy we don't have the daily mail anyway if you make a mistake so that recognition you have to experiment in learning by doing to solve big problems it's these lessons we need to learn and ask what would it look like in rai what would it look like inside the ministry of health what would it look like to have a public sector which is purpose-oriented public value-oriented welcomed experimentation as opposed to the old ideology of state versus business we have time for another question meanwhile i would like to make a comment so this idea about a purpose orientation this should apply to all of us because that should uh really drive also our life and this could have implications also for our private lives so if there are no questions i think that we can stop many thanks mariana mazzucato and once again i'm showing you the book i recommend this book it's accessible to everyone you don't need to be a professor in order to read it thank you thank you mariana you