<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail-article-info-container"><h1 class="gmail-article-title gmail-article-title-primary"><span style="font-weight:normal"><font size="2">Just this once, Jon ... :</font></span><span></span></h1><h1 class="gmail-article-title gmail-article-title-primary"></h1><h1 class="gmail-article-title gmail-article-title-primary"><span>ANTHONY BUTLER: Shooting for the moon is a pie in the sky goal for SA politics</span> </h1> <h3 class="gmail-article-title gmail-article-title-tertiary"> <span>Desperate
governments tend to hire advisers who will tell them what they want to
hear, and Mariana Mazzucato has our government’s ear</span> </h3> <div class="gmail-premium-icon"> BL PREMIUM </div> <div class="gmail-article-pub-date"> 02 April 2021 - 08:19 </div> </div> <div class="gmail-audio-player"> </div> <div class="gmail-premiumContent"> <div class="gmail-article-widgets"> <div id="gmail-05fe8a6a-c95e-44bf-8121-c6e350c264c8" class="gmail-article-widget gmail-article-widget-image" rel="image"> <div class="gmail-wrap"> <div class="gmail-image-container"> <a class="gmail-image" href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/4VDzJqnXuOGuuQprBljl2MO-Ic8lyJRasynKxMlwTSr0kDO_PC3u_g2HFEPuUcbB-H1CJGIzqVDFShn6c0_pKEHw1FB1cjDX0A=s1200" style="padding-top:55.3%"> </a> <div class="gmail-image-text"> <span class="gmail-description"> Mariana Mazzucato. Picture: SUPPLIED </span> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div id="gmail-f722c024-d7de-4c7a-ab6c-f8592c8a1c38" class="gmail-article-widget gmail-article-widget-text" rel="text"> <div class="gmail-wrap"> <div class="gmail-text"> <p>We
all agree that the presidential economic advisory council shouldn’t
just be a talking shop. It is less clear whether it should directly
challenge the conventional assumptions of the president and his
ministers, or instead accept — and merely refine — the prevailing ideas
of those in power.</p><p>Cynics have long embraced a general rule about
the role of ideas in political life. Politicians do not dispassionately
seek out the truth or, indeed, consistently recall that such a concept
exists. Instead, they search for theories — and academic advisers — that
tell them what they want to hear.</p><p>In this way their politically
convenient programmes can be presented as the outcomes of a process of
principled reasoning, purportedly built on robust intellectual
foundations.</p><p>A president suffering from fiscal incontinence —
perhaps because unions and special interest groups are breathing down
his neck — can recruit a modern monetary theorist to explain why his
actions are justified. Advisers to a desperate government that wants to
crank up the banknote printing presses can seek out intellectual
justifications for revoking central bank independence.</p><p>The most
high profile international member of the presidential economic advisory
council, Prof Mariana Mazzucato, founding director of an institute for
innovation at University College London, provides an interesting test
case for this theory about the role of ideas.</p><p>Some warning signs
accompanied Mazzucato’s recruitment. Apparently, public enterprises
minister Pravin Gordhan sought her out after reading her well-regarded
book on the “entrepreneurial state”. Ominously, her ideas also struck a
chord with trade, industry and competition minister Ebrahim Patel.
Introduced to President Cyril Ramaphosa at a Davos dinner, she was
apparently penciled in there and then for an advisory council role.</p><p>Unsurprisingly,
such a recruitment methodology can entrench the familiar pathology of
politicians being told only what they want to hear. There may be a
Mazzucato effect, in addition, which magnifies her influence: her
arguments are extremely well-organised, and they are unusually
powerfully expressed.</p> </div> </div> </div> <div id="gmail-5170f584-c737-4c74-b384-684009705e68" class="gmail-article-widget gmail-article-widget-text" rel="text"> <div class="gmail-wrap"> <div class="gmail-text"> <p>In a recently published book, <em>Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism</em>,
she revisits her earlier claims about state-led innovation in the
post-war US. But this is also a more ambitious effort “to rethink
capitalism through rethinking the state”, which captures some of the
anti-capitalist spirit of the times.</p><p>She points to the role of the
state in driving “game-changing” breakthroughs in technology-based
businesses, highlighting the dependence of companies such as Apple on
prior state-funded research, in the internet, programming languages, and
voice-activated systems, among many others. Google’s search algorithm
and the most profitable modern medicines alike, she shows, grew out of
state-funded projects.</p><p>Mazzucato methodically debunks a myth
prevalent in the US, and other parts of the global Anglosphere, that the
private sector is good and the public bad. She also powerfully condemns
the way risk has been socialised by the state while rewards have been
privatised by tax-dodging beneficiary corporations.</p><p>Her signature
theme is that the state should organise its interventions around “grand
challenges”. For her, the 1960s Apollo programme is the archetypal
“moonshot”, an inspirational mission that created not just new
technologies but also new markets and new human possibilities.</p><p>Today’s
grand challenges include climate change, the amelioration of global
poverty, gender inequality, hunger, and deficiencies in the provision of
basic education and health. Mazzucato concedes that these goals are
“even more challenging than the moon landing”. This is something of an
understatement. But her insistence that these challenges require
concerted action is important and undeniable.</p><p>Mazzucato’s
selection bias, however, represents a serious flaw of method, one she
shares with “developmental state” proponents: she cherry-picks
state-driven interventions that “worked” and ignores similar
interventions that didn’t. (Those who believe the moon landings were a
colossal waste of time and resources, driven by mindless superpower
rivalry, are not entertained at all.)</p><p>She does not reflect on the
failures, such as the 1970s US war on cancer, designed precisely to
replicate the alleged successes of Apollo, let alone the myriad
disastrous developmental state interventions that scarred many
economies, north and south, across the post-war period.</p><p>Giving
politicians leeway to engage in “moonshot” programmes has often been an
invitation for them to spread patronage and secure short term political
advantage. Today’s “strongman” leaders, in particular, are enamoured of
visionary initiatives, or great leaps forward that embody national
virility and symbolise the leader’s position at the vanguard of change.</p><p>SA
has had its own recent moonshots. For the Fifa Soccer World Cup in
2010, for example, routine state activities such as maintaining energy
and communications infrastructure were suspended, while resources were
poured into infrastructural white elephants. The event was essentially a
nationalist political project, so satisfying to elites that they have
been unable to account frankly for dismal balance of costs of benefits
it generated.</p><p>Former president Jacob Zuma’s proposed Russian
nuclear procurement exercise was perhaps another great mission, one that
was tragically derailed by counter-revolutionary forces.</p><p>In the
US, where scepticism about the state is deeply entrenched and acclaim
for entrepreneurial genius is naïve and fanciful, Mazzucato no doubt
provides a useful corrective to prevailing wisdom, especially among
conventional academic economists.</p><p>In SA, a “moonshot mentality” is
likely to be less benign, liable instead to entrench the reactionary
mindsets of some economy cluster ministers, and to embolden them in
their many ill-considered interventions.</p><p>Privatising SA’s
state-owned enterprises, Mazzucato has claimed, will “deprive the state
... of an important pool of technical competencies in strategic
sectors”. But SAA is not going to the moon. It can’t even get off the
ground.</p><p><i><span>• </span></i><i><span>Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.</span></i></p><p><i><span>--------------------------------</span></i></p><div class="gmail-article-info-container"><div class="gmail-category"><div class="gmail-section"><span class="gmail-bd"> </span></div></div> <h2 class="gmail-article-title gmail-article-title-secondary"> </h2> <h1 class="gmail-article-title gmail-article-title-primary"> <span>The world renowned economist seeking to transform capitalism hopes to also help SA dream again</span> </h1> <h3 class="gmail-article-title gmail-article-title-tertiary"> <span>The
professor’s views have captured the imagination of a number of SA
government officials, including President Cyril Ramaphosa and Pravin
Gordhan</span> </h3> <div class="gmail-premium-icon"> BL PREMIUM </div> <div class="gmail-article-pub-date"> 10 October 2019 - 14:22 <span id="gmail-authors" class="gmail-heading-author"><span class="gmail-authors-list">Lynley Donnelly</span></span> </div> </div> <div class="gmail-audio-player"> </div> <div class="gmail-premiumContent"> <div class="gmail-article-widgets"> <div id="gmail-a31d6d8c-5e64-4790-8ea9-7ee09e88bc54" class="gmail-article-widget gmail-article-widget-image" rel="image"> <div class="gmail-wrap"> <div class="gmail-image-container"> <a class="gmail-image" href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/WDS9d1Uywy8slIf-tEBTHyBUja7F6pYzXPBdWHQrGlkXKM-l5YpRJbVUPv-PR9204H4bNmA5fIwe2_ZSaKGRUWrXC-2CgEA=s1200" style="padding-top:51.8871%"> </a></div><div class="gmail-image-container"><a class="gmail-image" href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/WDS9d1Uywy8slIf-tEBTHyBUja7F6pYzXPBdWHQrGlkXKM-l5YpRJbVUPv-PR9204H4bNmA5fIwe2_ZSaKGRUWrXC-2CgEA=s1200" style="padding-top:51.8871%"> </a> <div class="gmail-image-text"> <span class="gmail-description"> Mariana Mazzucato Picture: SUPPLIED </span> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div id="gmail-86cd4390-97e5-4190-9bf9-153db5fa42b6" class="gmail-article-widget gmail-article-widget-text" rel="text"> <div class="gmail-wrap"> <div class="gmail-text"> <p>Even
after stepping off an international flight, and despite a troublesome
phone line, economics professor Mariana Mazzucato, comes across exactly
like she does in the countless podcasts, YouTube videos, and articles.
No nonsense, forthright, and articulate about her ideas. </p>
<p>Those ideas — which have led her to advise everyone from firebrand US
politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to the European commissioner for
research, science and innovation Carlos Moedas, and the government of
Scotland — have captured the imagination of a number of SA government
officials.</p>
<p>As a result, Mazzucato now counts President Cyril Ramaphosa’s
economic advisory council, which met for the first time on Wednesday,
among her many advisory roles.</p>
<p>The Italian-born and American-raised professor’s local fans include
public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan. The minister introduced
Mazzucato to Ramaphosa at this year’s World Economic Forum after an
“intense discussion” about how an entrepreneurial state — an important
theme of Mazzucato’s work and the subject of her breakout 2013 book —
can help catalyse innovation in SA.</p>
<p>Her first book —<i> The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths</i>
— interrogates the narrative that the private sector is solely where
innovation happens. It examines the large risks and early-stage
investments taken by the likes of the US government that made the
extraordinary growth and profitability of companies like Apple
possible.</p>
<p>As the founding director of the Institute for Innovation & Public
Purpose (IIPP) at University College London, Mazzucato’s work also
includes helping governments to reframe the way they approach policy.
Not as a series of sector-specific targets, but as a set of clearly
defined missions that aim to address societal problems, which various
actors across the public and private arena work on together.</p>
<p>Another admirer is trade and industry minister Ebrahim Patel, who in a
recent interview with the Mail & Guardian referenced Mazzucato’s
book and bemoaned what he sees as SA’s “strawman” debate, that
routinely pits the state against the private sector.</p>
<p>Mazzucato’s work critically examines this question.</p>
<p>“Depicting the private business as the innovative force, while the
state is cast as the inertial one — necessary for the ‘basics, but too
large and heavy to be the dynamic engine’— is a description that can
become a self-fulfilling prophecy.</p>
<p>“If we continue to depict the state as only a facilitator and
administrator and tell it to stop dreaming, in the end that is what we
get, and ironically it also then becomes easier to criticise it for
being lame and inefficient,” she says in her book.</p>
<p>In SA, however, discussions over the state’s role in the economy
remain contentious. The tension has arguably only worsened after a
decade of corruption left many of the country’s state-owned institutions
stripped of money, skills and morale. It has all but eradicated the
public’s confidence in the state’s ability to achieve anything.</p>
<p>But Mazzucato acknowledges the problem of corruption — “believe me as
an Italian I know a lot about that”, she tells Business Day — as well
as state capacity.</p>
<p>In countries with a history of corruption, it is very important to
tackle the problem seriously while not giving into the dichotomous
narrative that the public is bad, and the private is good, she says.</p>
<p>The problems facing SA’s state-owned entities (SOEs), many of which
became ground zero in battles between political factions and patronage
networks in recent years, loom large for Mazzucato. But outright
privatisation of SOEs would, she argues, “deprive the state and other
interacting private companies in the economy of an important pool of
technical competencies in strategic sectors”.</p>
<p>A key concern, she says, will be determining what it means to “remain
public but to serve the public good and not give in to sectoral
political interests”.</p>
<p>State capacity is a problem, not just in developing countries, she
points out. But when the state is there simply to fix market failures,
it has “little incentive to invest in its internal capabilities and
capacities” she argues, becoming reliant on consultants, and in the case
of many developing countries, philanthropic organisations.</p>
<p>Mazzucato joins what has been largely viewed as a stellar list of
economists and academics that make up the council. It includes the likes
of Dani Rodrik, a professor of International Political Economy at the
John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and an adviser
to former president Thabo Mbeki. As well as infrastructure and
regulatory economist Grové Steyn; agricultural economist Wandile
Sihlobo, and former governor of the Bank of Tanzania Benno Ndulu to name
just a few.</p>
<p>But the council’s announcement was quickly followed by the question:
Why does SA need yet another advisory body when what it really needs is
policy implementation.</p>
<p>Mazzucato is keenly aware of this.</p>
<p>“I am not an expert on SA, and I will ... at least try to learn and listen and not just go there and preach,” she says.</p>
<p>She will not emphasise “new stuff to be done”. Instead her focus will
be on how to “rethink existing instruments” in the government’s toolbox
like procurement, for example, to “nurture new solutions” to SA’s
well-diagnosed problems.</p>
<p>This approach also tackles the question of money, particularly
pertinent in SA’s case as an extra bailout for embattled power utility
Eskom is expected to widen the budget deficit and drive up the country’s
debt to GDP ratio.</p>
<p>Crying foul over budget constraints is, Mazzucato says, “a false problem”. </p>
<p><b>“</b>The budget of any country is huge,” she says.</p>
<p>“It’s not as if the SA government isn’t spending money, the question is how to transform some of the ways [of] spending money.”</p>
<p>It is important not to underestimate just how much change can come
from “transforming static instruments like government purchasing power”
into more dynamic instruments, that make public spending more strategic
and crowd in other forms of finance.</p>
<p>“The state can do nothing by itself, they need other partners but if
the state instruments are static they then fail to crowd in other forms
of finance,” she says.</p>
<p><a href="mailto://donnellyl@businesslive.co.za"><em>donnellyl@businesslive.co.za</em></a></p> </div> </div> </div></div></div><p><i><span></span></i></p><p><i><span><br></span></i></p> </div> </div> </div></div></div><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div style="text-align:left">-------<br>Keith Breckenridge <b><span style="color:rgb(153,0,0)">W I S E R</span></b><span style="color:rgb(102,102,102)"> - The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand | Pbag 3, PO Wits, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2050 |<font size="2"> Phone +27(0)11-7174272 | </font></span><span style="color:rgb(102,102,102)">Web</span>: <font size="2"><a href="http://wiser.wits.ac.za" target="_blank">wiser.wits.ac.za </a><br></font></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, 3 May 2021 at 10:28, Jonathan Klaaren <<a href="mailto:Jonathan.Klaaren@wits.ac.za">Jonathan.Klaaren@wits.ac.za</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt">Thanks Keith – both of these articles are behind a paywall – is there an alternative access or can some pirate circulate?<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12pt"><b><span style="font-size:12pt;color:black">From:
</span></b><span style="font-size:12pt;color:black">State <<a href="mailto:state-bounces@lists.wiser.org.za" target="_blank">state-bounces@lists.wiser.org.za</a>> on behalf of Keith Breckenridge <<a href="mailto:keith@breckenridge.org.za" target="_blank">keith@breckenridge.org.za</a>><br>
<b>Date: </b>Monday, 03 May 2021 at 10:20<br>
<b>To: </b><a href="mailto:state@lists.wiser.org.za" target="_blank">state@lists.wiser.org.za</a> <<a href="mailto:state@lists.wiser.org.za" target="_blank">state@lists.wiser.org.za</a>><br>
<b>Subject: </b>Re: [State@Wits] WIPES 3<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">A reminder of the meeting on Thursday this week to discuss Mazzucato's
<i>Entrepreneurial State. </i>There's a grumpy assessment <a href="https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2021-04-02-anthony-butler-shooting-for-the-moon-is-a-pie-in-the-sky-goal-for-sa-politics/" target="_blank">
here</a> by Anthony Butler, and a more optimistic one <a href="https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/national/2019-10-10-how-mariana-mazzucato-aims-to-help-get-the-state-dreaming-again/" target="_blank">
here</a> by Lynley Donnelly.<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b>** Please note that the meeting will be at 4pm</b> -- I got the time wrong in the mail last week.
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<p class="MsoNormal">Here's the Zoom link : <a href="https://wits-za.zoom.us/j/94809440246?pwd=MHNYQ05zTUhjMEZNMDRZekQ1Y2Ftdz09" target="_blank">
https://wits-za.zoom.us/j/94809440246?pwd=MHNYQ05zTUhjMEZNMDRZekQ1Y2Ftdz09</a><u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">-------<br>
Keith Breckenridge <b><span style="color:rgb(153,0,0)">W I S E R</span></b><span style="color:rgb(102,102,102)"> - The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand | Pbag 3, PO Wits, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2050 |</span><span style="font-size:10pt;color:rgb(102,102,102)">
Phone +27(0)11-7174272 | </span><span style="color:rgb(102,102,102)">Web</span>: <span style="font-size:10pt">
<a href="http://wiser.wits.ac.za" target="_blank">wiser.wits.ac.za </a></span><u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">On Thu, 29 Apr 2021 at 12:36, Keith Breckenridge <<a href="mailto:keith@breckenridge.org.za" target="_blank">keith@breckenridge.org.za</a>> wrote:<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">We will be reading <u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"><b>Mazzucato, M. (2015). <i>The entrepreneurial state: Debunking public vs. private sector myths</i>. Chapters : Intro, 1, 8 & 9.
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<p class="MsoNormal">For next Thursday, May 6, at 6pm. <u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Zoom link to follow on the day. <u></u><u></u></p>
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Keith Breckenridge <b><span style="color:rgb(153,0,0)">W I S E R</span></b><span style="color:rgb(102,102,102)"> - The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand | Pbag 3, PO Wits, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2050 |</span><span style="font-size:10pt;color:rgb(102,102,102)">
Phone +27(0)11-7174272 | </span><span style="color:rgb(102,102,102)">Web</span>: <span style="font-size:10pt">
<a href="http://wiser.wits.ac.za" target="_blank">wiser.wits.ac.za </a></span><u></u><u></u></p>
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