Reading books that reinforce your worldview is comforting. But enlightenment requires a degree of masochism. As with workplace feedback – daggers delivered with a smile – it is only when you are asked to re-evaluate your own basic goodness that you will take meaningful steps towards a deeper understanding. Such was my experience of reading Mariana Mazzucato’s Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism (Allen Lane, 2020). Rewarding precisely for how painful it was for me to read.

The main problem with the world today – or at least with society’s ability to tackle its problems – is, according to Mazzucato, governments losing the self-confidence (and the confidence of others) that they should lead and drive social change. Instead, they have outsourced the thinking to management consultants like McKinsey: overpriced snake-oil salesmen with flashy PowerPoints and no substance. These consultants, cheerleaders of a decades long movement to “get government out of the way” and make it function more like a business, have driven the outsourcing, downsizing, de-skilling and overall retreat of the public sector. In its place they have built an edifice of waste, strategic drift and the transfer of value from public into private hands. This has left us without the tools to tackle our greatest challenges, like climate change, urban renewal and aging.