MAIN IDEA:

This book mainly responds to the popular ideas promoted by supporters of “Entrepreneurial State” that claim that all achievements of individual entrepreneurs result from government activities that created infrastructure and support the rule of law. Specifically, it is directed against Mazzucato – an Italian economist, who is getting more and more power as an adviser to the government. She and other promoters of such ideas, such as Piketty and Obama, with his “you did not build your business. The government did it”. The authors methodically go step by step through pseudo-economic ideas promoted by these people and demonstrate that these ideas are not workable and often based on false data and an entirely discredited ideology of socialism.   

CONTENT:

Part I – Popular, But Mistaken, Economic Ideas
1. Introducing Mazzucato
2. Statism and Its Allies
3. Statist Intervention Is Not Innocent

Part II – Innovism Has, In Fact, Worked Bottom-up
4. The Great Enrichment Came Not from the State but from Liberty
5. “Driving” from the Top Is Not Its Explanation
6. Bottom-Up Does Work
7. Economic History Rejects Mazzucato’s Hypothesis
8. There Is No “Linear Model”
9. The Internet, for Example, Was Not Invented by the State
10. Bottom-Up, Then, Is Pretty Good
11. One Must Measure the State with a Sample of the Economy

Part III – Statism Has Never Worked
12. The State Should Have a Role, but Should Not be the Director
13. For Understandable Reasons the State Is Bad at Innovation
14. Most Governments, After All, Are Demonstrably Incompetent
15. State Foresightedness Is Implausible
16. The Hypothesis of Significantly Imperfect Market Has Never Been Tested
17. Stakeholder Theory is Defective

Part IV – The Political Economy of Mazzucato is thoroughly Illiberal
18. Mazzucato Distrusts Ordinary People
19. Keynesian Mastery Takes Away Dignity
20. The Market Accords Dignity

Part V – Illiberalism Leads to Deep Technical Errors
21. The Economic Errors of Lawyers and Pre- 1870s Economists
22. The Top-Down and Legacy-Payment of Statism are Illiberal
23. The Supply-Chain Fallacy Underlies Mazzucato’s Method
24. The Enchaining of Human Action Reverts to a Labor Theory of Value
25. What Sort of Economy Do People Want?

MY TAKE ON IT:

It is a very nice book, and it could be very educational for anybody who still doubts that socialism is not working in any of its multiple forms. It failed either as fully totalitarian state ownership of the means of production as in the USSR, or as corporatist socialism of Mussolini, or in its currently popular reincarnation as “the big benevolent government” of welfare states. I think that the idea of socialism was quite scientific at the time of Marx in the XIX century as a hypothesis. Still, many countries’ experiences have thoroughly discarded it by now. What is clear is that any supporters of communism and socialism are either illiterate bums, both economically and historically, or just plain power-hungry immoral crooks. Considering the dismal state of education elsewhere in the world, I would say that the people until their mid-twenties usually belong to the former type because of miseducation. As to professional economists, I do not see how any of them who still support socialism could be anything but one of the latter types – crooks.