The Value of Everything (US)

Modern economies reward activities that extract value rather than create it. This must change to insure a capitalism that works for us all. A scathing indictment of our current global financial system, The Value of Everything rigorously scrutinizes the way in which economic value has been accounted, and reveals how economic theory has failed to clearly delineate the difference between value creation and value extraction. Mariana Mazzucato argues that the increasingly blurry distinction between the two categories has allowed certain actors in the economy to portray themselves as value creators, while in reality they are just moving around existing value or, even worse, destroying it. The book uses case studies-from Silicon Valley to the financial sector to big pharma-to show how the foggy notions of value create confusion between rents and profits, reward extractors and creators, and distort the measurements of growth and GDP. In the process, innovation...