The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy by Mariana MazzucatoMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
What is value? What is valued? What is more valuable than something else?
Is it as simple as value = price that market pays for it?
The book takes a provocative stand against the way the value of goods, services, GDP etc is calculated.
For example, a resource that is destroyed by pollution may not be counted as a subtraction from GDP – but when pollution is cleaned up by marketed services, GDP increases. An obvious paradox it is.
One notorious example of where creating and extracting value has been mixed up in the recent decades, according to Mazzucato, is financial sector. If before it was mainly about financing 'real' economy, then most of finance today is about trading between various financial institutions.
"Finance is valuable simply because it is valued, not because it creates that much value."
One of the main arguments of the book is that much of valuable investment that fosters society is done by public / government (schools, universities, basic science, roads, radical innovation such as Internet) - but its role is routinely seen as mostly a 'regulator' that should not intervene in an otherwise free-standing market economy.
Although well researched and making one to think critically, the book does not really offer a solution of how to measure real value of anything - what shall and what shall not be considered when saying that something is of value X and not Y. It is also somewhat idealistic about the value-creating nature of the state. In many cases having government investing into common good is indeed desirable - yet in many other (more?) cases around the world it tends to lead to cronyism, corruption and nepotism.
