Italian-American economist, founding director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, and the contemporary economist who has done most to return the case for an active, mission-oriented state to serious policy conversation — not as Keynesian demand management but as the actual driver of long-run innovation and economic direction. Educated at Tufts and the New School, with earlier posts at Sussex and the Open University, Mazzucato advises governments (the UK, Scotland, South Africa, the European Commission, the Vatican, several UN bodies) in a way that most academic economists do not.
The Entrepreneurial State (2013) is the book that made her name. The argument is empirical: the technologies that underpin the smartphone in your pocket — the internet itself, GPS, touchscreen displays, voice recognition, the algorithms behind search — were overwhelmingly developed with public funding through agencies such as DARPA, the NIH, and the NSF, then commercialized by private firms that collected the returns. The conventional picture of a dynamic private sector innovating against a lumbering state gets the historical record backwards: the modern American economy's most consequential innovations came from public investment in high-risk early-stage research that no private actor would have undertaken. The book was a particular embarrassment to Silicon Valley's self-narrative and, for that reason, a particular success.
The Value of Everything (2018) made the deeper argument that modern economics has lost the capacity to distinguish between value creation and value extraction — between activities that add to what a society has and activities that redistribute existing value upward. Mission Economy (2021) set out a programmatic alternative: treating large public challenges (climate, health, inequality) on the model of the Apollo program, with government setting directional missions, crowding in private investment, and ensuring public returns on public risk. Her agenda is a 21st-century revival of the politics of industrial policy and public purpose, argued from within the economic mainstream rather than from the heterodox fringe, and it has moved the policy Overton window in several governments.