It is best to read Mariana Mazzucato on the beach, or at least that is my experience. At that time, both body and mind are relaxed, the sun is strongest, and there is finally a little time to reflect on ideas that fascinated you in the past, but also to read new ideas that will “carry you” when you return to work. While reading The Entrepreneurial State, butterflies appear, and Mazzucato writes so clearly and beautifully that you do not want to enter the sea.
Page by page, you feel like you are in the first or second year of studying economics and deciding who is closer to your heart – Keynes or Friedman. And then comes the blind defense of the chosen ideological position. How can a person not feel good while reading how Mazzucato calls for mission, for a higher purpose, and for raising ambitions?
How can those words not feel like a balm on the wound when you are troubled by the fact that in your country, a decent summer vacation costs two average salaries or three and a half median wages? That the achievement of your economy is that people are winding cables, or, to avoid being too cynical, making windshield wipers that are sold at cost to the parent company in Germany.
When Mazzucato adds thoughts attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea” – the fascination with her ideas reaches its peak. There is hope that someone will set a mission to aim for more than just winding cables and windshield wipers. That someone will dream of the final product and the great added value we can create for ourselves. After the wave of motivation in my head, all as a result of what Mazzucato writes – that clever and seductive fact about an average of 26 years in the Apollo mission control room – consciousness returned.
Consciousness returned as a result of realizing that something in Mazzucato does not quite fit for me. She motivates excellently and gives guidance, but I cannot find a connection for how it could apply to the paradigm in my country. Summer passed, real politics and the real economy returned, and Mazzucato fell into the background. But, as luck would have it, Ivan Radanović, through conversations and columns reviewing four of Mariana Mazzucato’s books, reopened the questions from the previous summer. Does this economist annoy me?! Or do I admire her because she opens eyes and gives a guide on how economic policies should be created?! Column after column, question after question, but no answers.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
On top of that, Radanović does not write about what troubles me – whether Mazzucato is useful to me and whether I can fit her ideas and penetrate deeper into the problems of economic (under)development in Serbia. She is classified as left-wing, flirts with being anti-capitalist, and once it is clear she is obviously Keynesian (which I do not fully agree with), I think of giving up on Mariana Mazzucato’s ideas completely. The question continues to bother me: is Mariana Mazzucato only good at what she herself criticizes – storytelling – or is there something deep in her ideas?
Revelation and escape from “paralysis by analysis”
Visiting a friend in his car repair shop showed me that answers are often simple; it only seems to us that they must be complicated for us to accept them and earn our respect. Especially in social sciences like economics. Otherwise, I often learn a lot from this friend who works in mechanics; he always gives a simple answer, and in an instant, the professional deformation of “paralysis by analysis” disappears.
A client left his car for regular service, with a price exceeding tens of thousands of euros. While we were moving around the shop, I asked him if I could just sit in the limousine to see what it feels like. He calmly said it was not a good idea because “I don’t have the shoes for that limousine.” We laughed heartily, and I have often shared this masterful joke because it helped me understand that one must have measure and recognize their league. You should not insist on something that does not fit you, and it is the same with Mariana Mazzucato’s ideas. Simply put, I don’t have the shoes to fit Mariana Mazzucato into the Serbian economy.
Is Mariana Mazzucato only good at what she herself criticizes – storytelling – or is there something deeper in her ideas?
Mariana Mazzucato writes about ideas that are applicable in the case of developed capitalist economies, those that need an upgrade and “fix” of the capitalist system. Mazzucato talks about economies where national agencies exist whose technocrats plan for the security of the country for the next 50 years. Countries with DARPA, which finances research that has a spillover effect on the private sector, and only then asks the question of socially fair profit distribution. In the economies she writes about, to which upgrades are necessary, not just anyone can put whatever they want on a drone and sell it to the state.
These economies have not experienced the same professors teaching Political Economy in the summer semester and Principles of Economics in the winter semester, with the transition going smoothly as if nothing happened.
These are some of the reasons why I believe we cannot interpret the Serbian economy through the lens of Mariana Mazzucato’s ideas. Still, her ideas and the ideas of leading economists need to be followed and analyzed, whether they can fit into our peripheral context or not. All this to try to reduce the gap with the leaders in creating economic paradigms.
However, when the butterflies appear while reading Mariana Mazzucato, we should not rush to graft her ideas onto Serbia and search through them for a cure for the current state of the Serbian economy. It is dangerous.
Simply put, we don’t have the shoes for that!
Author: Nenad Jevtović, economist, Institute for Development and Innovation
