Modern businesses and governments are entrenched in relationships with the consulting industry: a multibillion dollar industry that promises expertise and efficiency to cut through the stagnancy of bureaucracy. But according to our guest, it rarely delivers on those promises.

Rosie Collington is a political economist at the University College London’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. She and Mariana Mazzucato are co-authors of "The Big Con: How The Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies." 

Collington joined us to discuss the book. She and Mazzucato expose our economies’ reliance on consulting firms and how they have obfuscated corporate and political accountability, heightened the extraction of privatization, and capitalized on crises like climate change — to the world’s detriment.