mariana mazzucato has been one of the leading critics of the premise that government should not “pick winners” using industrial policies. She has demolished this argument by reference both to theory and to history. The market fundamentalism of the so-called Washington Consensus, she has demonstrated, has produced disasters more often than gains. She has also shown in her previous work that the entire history of economic development is filled with governments intervening constructively—not just in Asian developmental states, but also in countries that are supposedly more libertarian, such as the United States.
Now Mazzucato and colleagues, wary of too much top-down planning, propose a kind of middle ground: not quite picking winners, but intervening to lead “market-shaping missions” using a wide range of policy tools. This strikes us as exactly right as a framework. Our only quibble is that the essay is at a fairly high level of generality. The most urgent questions we face today aren’t at the level of general principles but at the level of concrete details.