The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

The award-winning author of The Entrepreneurial State and Mission Economy offers a scathing indictment of a global financial system that incentivizes taking over making and extraction over creation

“A stimulating analysis of the underlying causes of inequality and growth which forces us to confront long-held beliefs about how economies work and who benefits.” —Martin Wolf, Financial Times

The Value of Everything is a penetrating and passionate argument that modern capitalism has failed to clearly delineate between value creation and value extraction. As economist Mariana Mazzucato shows, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street and beyond, foggy notions of value create confusion between rents and profits, reward extractors rather than creators, and distort the measurements of growth and GDP. Asset management companies profit exorbitantly off of income generated elsewhere; big pharma uses value-based pricing to justify astronomically high prices for vital medicines that are publicly funded. In the process, innovation suffers and inequality widens.

Now updated with a new preface, The Value of Everything reignites the debate over how we measure value in our society—and in so doing, shows how we can shape our economy to be more innovative and inclusive.