**How governments can spur growth and innovation to solve their greatest
challenges--from green energy to national security to building resilient
health systems.
**
Known around the world for challenging mainstream economics, economist
Mariana Mazzucato believes that "the public sector can and should be a
co-creator of wealth that actively steers growth to meet its goals"
(The Financial Times). In The Mission-Driven Economy, she calls on
governments to create the economies we need today.
Mazzucato's challenge leads off a debate on the revival of Industrial
policy--roughly defined as deliberate government action to re(shape) the
economy. Industrial policy has fallen out of favor in recent decades as
economists defer to free markets to produce innovation and growth. Yet
today thinkers across the political spectrum have begun expressing new
interest in industrial policy as a way to address the most serious
problems of our times: from national security and climate change, to the
market's underfunding of public goods, to sluggish economic growth and
labor market dysfunction.
Together, contributors make a compelling case for industrial
policy--what it is, and why we need it now. Addressing investment,
innovation, supply chains, and growth, they offer a robust vision of a
renewed industrial policy, and what it can offer the US economy in the
face of climate change and a global pandemic.