Matt Lucky reviews Mariana Mazzucato’s new book The Common Good Economy: A new compass, now out at Basic Venture Group.
Leo Strauss, a 20th-century political philosopher, contended that his discipline had lost its way in the transition from the classical world to the modern. The classics were, he argued, “guided by the question of the best regime,” indicating a comprehensive vision of a society that is engineered to allow citizens to live according to a common set of virtues and an idea of the good. The moderns, in contrast, relinquished higher comprehensive aspirations to settle, as Thomas Hobbes did, on merely drafting suggestions for how to enable humans to kill each other less often. Contemporary liberal frameworks like those from John Rawls have similarly elided the pursuit of comprehensive shared values to favor individuals pursuing their particular ends, especially through a market mechanism.
University College London professor Mariana Mazzucato, in her most recent book, The Common Good Economy: A new compass, displays an affinity for that classical aspiration toward a good regime by inviting readers to reconceptualize the goals of the economy and the state’s role in pursuing them. She repeatedly invokes Aristotle’s notion that a polis (political community) ought to be centered on a common telos (goal), and suggests that we emulate the Aristotelian model by identifying common societal goals and aligning the operations of our political communities with those shared objectives.
Reviving this orientation toward a common goal is a corrective for what Mazzucato describes as the contemporary “market failure lens.” That view, she argues, narrowly conceives the role of governments to be to fix negative externalities when markets go wrong. Mazzucato relates, “this view of the state as a market-fixer has led to the idea that government should not steer the economy but only regulate and facilitate it, which in turn affects the capabilities the state thinks it needs.” There is, in this narrative, a self-imposed myopia in modern states that cannot envision pursuing grand projects of common interest. To wit, Mazzucato argues that “Had NASA performed a [modern cost-benefit analysis], the moon landing would have never happened!”
In contrast to a myopic conception of the state as the repairman for broken markets, Mazzucato, in line with her previous work on the Mission Economy and The Entrepreneurial State, invites a proactive role for the state to shape markets to achieve shared well-being. The scope of Mazzucato’s ambitions here is best captured by her favorable references to the military-industrial complex as an exemplar of mission-oriented approaches. When preparing for and executing a war, she argues, states can set clear objectives and pursue them as true imperatives with all the tools at their disposal. Mazzucato laments that we are unwilling to muster the same vigor to address social problems around healthcare and climate change. “Economic discipline is demanded for protecting the planet,” she writes, “but rarely for preparing for war.” If states were willing to adopt a mission-oriented approach beyond warfare, this would entail the “use all the levers to tilt the playing field,” including leveraging conditions in procurement contracts, loans, and subsidies to shape the market around the state’s conception of the common good. Mazzucato instructs that we must abandon the notion of the state as a neutral referee overseeing markets and acclimate to government actors tilting the playing field to favor specific principles and outcomes.
Mazzucato presents a “common good compass” comprising five points to guide market-shaping activities. It requires: 1) purpose and directionality, which entails “moving beyond the narrow, growth-only mindset towards actively deciding where we want the economy to go” by setting clear, measurable objectives; 2) co-creation and participation, which requires that people must democratically decide upon the common good; 3) collective learning and knowledge sharing, which is expressed in a few forms, including calls for municipal data commons and weakening intellectual property rights; 4) access to all for rewards by way of a mix of predistributive policies, comprehensive taxes on the affluent, and the state taking stakes in successful companies they initially subsidize. Finally, we also need 5) transparency/accountability, which involves mostly what you would expect, though there is an oddly placed discussion of human rights in the relevant chapter. Mazzucato contends that these procedural elements all implemented holistically together allow the common good to be pursued as a non-utopian end.
This all, of course, raises the question of how we decide upon an agreed conception of the common good. The inhesion of reasonable pluralism concerning values and conceptions of the good is a piece of the human condition, so how do we negotiate the essentially contested nature of finding some common good? Mazzucato’s guidance surveys philosophical contributions ranging from Aristotle and Aquinas to Michael Sandel. She observes, “The idea of the common good is widely appealing but interpreted in multiple ways. For Aristotle, it meant cultivating virtue; for theologians, attaining salvation; and for communitarians, pursuing the good life within a community.” While acknowledging these contributions, Mazzucato ultimately declines to embrace any of these particular philosophical accounts of the common good, aside from incorporating Aristotle’s preference for a participatory political life practiced in common among citizens. Rather, she “assumes that what counts as ‘good’, and how this translates into economics, should be determined collectively” [emphasis added]. That is, we need forms of participatory democratic engagement in societies so that the people can collectively decide for themselves what the good is, rather than a scholar or philosopher didactically imposing their vision on the public.
That said, she clearly has some notions of the good in mind as captured in her sundry examples. Yet, those examples vary wildly. At times we encounter calls for global action. For example, “water must be governed as a global common good,” [emphasis added]. Meanwhile, in many other instances the common good is rooted in narrow local communities. Likewise, at times the common good appears as a thin universal value consisting of meeting basic human material and bodily needs, as with the water example above. At other points, in contrast, the common good appears to be a thicker particular value set centering on shared identity, cultural expressions, and participatory life in small communities. On the latter point, Mazzucato offers that “Carnival is a perfect example of the common good in action: uniting people across social, racial and economic divisions in a shared celebration that preserves cultural heritage, encourages social inclusion, and fosters collective joy and community identity.”
It is unclear how the many varied conceptions of the good expressed in Mazzucato’s examples ought to be approached through the same methods required by the guiding compass or even bundled in the same theory. The participatory democratic institutions Mazzucato insists on throughout, for instance, are a natural fit for local conceptions of the good where ruling and being ruled in turn is a coherent part of community life. Indeed, on that local level, participatory democracy can simultaneously be both a means for pursuing and defining the good, but also a piece of the good itself. One world government for water management, in contrast, does not lend itself to participatory community self-governance. I suspect that if Mazzucato had divided The Common Good into two book projects, one local and one global, some of the tension that emerges from working across these varied approaches to the good would be ameliorated.
I have a few points of concern to close on. First, despite the central load-bearing role that participation plays in defining the common good, democratic engagement is waifishly theorized. For instance, I am troubled by Mazzucato’s call for participation to happen “at every stage of the policy cycle,” While participation can be a wonderful method for resolving some intractable social problems, it can also be a massive waste of time or a fatal veto point if applied in an injudicious and categorical form. For instance, political scientists Katherine Einstein, Maxwell Palmer, and David M. Glick find that community participation in local zoning decisions largely serves to allow existing homeowners to block new construction, echoing familiar abundance critiques. Likewise, institutions for meaningful participation can be fragile and liable to, for instance, capture by elites and experts. On this point, science and technology studies professors Harry Collins and Robert Evans write that public participation with technology policy questions often serves, “more to gather information needed to improve the public relations campaigns that will be used to legitimate an already agreed policy,” rather than to empower the participants.
Here I am inclined to heed political scientist Frank Fischer, who, while advocating for a robust role for citizen participation in science, also strongly cautions against applying participation indiscriminately as a panacea. A blanket imperative for participation at every stage of policymaking, as Mazzucato advocates, seems doomed to backfire frequently alongside the benefits it delivers in other instances.
Secondly, participatory engagement in policy-making requires institutions, and choices about institutional designs can matter significantly for determining outcomes. A simple question, for instance, would be: how do we decide the community of interest for a specific matter of concern? The “common good” in zoning policy democratically selected by a suburb full of existing homeowners may be very different from the “common good” as determined when future potential residents are included in the vote. The latter may prefer more multifamily residential zoning compared to the former, for example. Determining the boundaries of a community (polis) will, in turn, help define the common good (telos). Aristotle, writing from a classical city-state, simply took the shared identity of polis and telos for granted, but we moderns cannot take this alignment as given. We cannot resolve this question through democratic voting, because voting assumes boundaries already exist between the enfranchised and the excluded. To wit, voting assumes the polis is already defined.
Additionally, Mazzucato’s categorical requirement that all five points of her compass be present for the common good to emerge is not wholly persuasive. That is, she writes, “Crucially, the compass equips us with a holistic approach to the common good, so that all the elements are seen as equally important for navigation—rather than ‘pick and choose’.” She further articulates that “neglecting any one of them leaves the framework open to capture by special interests, resulting in ‘common good washing’.” While the five points of the compass are virtuous procedural attributes, I am not persuaded that they are necessary conditions for the common good. The eradication of smallpox, for instance, seems like a clear contribution to the common good. Yet, I’m not sure the procedural methods for achieving it would satisfy Mazzucato’s requirements for co-participation, especially not “at every stage of the policy cycle.” Likewise, Dani Rodrick’s argument that climate progress has been made through self-interested national industrial policies (e.g., the Chinese Communist Party’s subsidies for green energy) is another example of a global common benefit emerging from a process that does not adhere to every point on the compass.
A further concern is that by contending that all five points of the compass need to be consistently present, Mazzucato avoids confronting the possibility of difficult tradeoffs. For instance, the compass points of 1) purpose and directionality and 2) co-creation and participation might conflict if the latter democratic processes fail to reach consensus on a mission. Likewise, participatory mechanisms can encumber accountability if they turn into procedural quagmires that let bureaucrats off the hook for failing to complete missions. This point speaks to a more general concern with The Common Good Economy, which is that Mazzucato presents a world where sundry human goals are not in tension, writing, “It is wrong to think that there is a crude trade-off between societal wellbeing and economic growth and that human suffering may be the price to pay for economic growth. If growth is directed, it can stimulate innovation towards shared goals, boosting productivity and prosperity along the way.” I would be glad to live in a world where there are no difficult trade-offs, yet, alas, that vision is difficult to credit.
Author’s Disclosures: The author reports no conflicts of interest. You can read our disclosure policy here.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
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