Contributor(s): Professor Mariana Mazzucato | Join us for this public lecture by Mariana Mazzucato who will outline her new approach for governments to deal with inequality, disease and climate change.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, capitalism was stuck. It had no answer to the different challenges facing the world – from those related to health to digital privacy to the climate crisis. Taking inspiration from President Kennedy’s ‘moonshot’ programmes that successfully co-ordinated public and private sectors to put a man on the moon, Mariana Mazzucato calls for the same level of boldness and experimentation to be applied to the biggest social and political issues of our time. She argues we need to rethink the capacities and role of government within the economy and society, and above all recover a sense of public purpose.

Meet our speaker and chair

Mariana Mazzucato (@MazzucatoM) is Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL), where she is Founding Director of the Institute for Innovation & Public Purpose (IIPP). Her highly-acclaimed book The Entrepreneurial State investigates the critical role the state plays in driving growth—and her book The Value of Everything looks at how value creation needs to be rewarded over value extraction. Her latest book Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism will be released in January 2021. She advises policy makers around the world on innovation-led, inclusive and sustainable growth.

You can order the book, Mission Economy: a moonshot guide to changing capitalism, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney.

Alan Manning is Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at LSE.

More about this event

The Department of Economics (@LSEEcon) at LSE, is one of the leading economics departments in the world. We are a large department, ensuring all mainstream areas of economics are strongly represented in research and teaching.

This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19