Book Launch—The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

The 2008 global financial crisis revealed that modern economies reward activities that extract economic value rather than create it. In her critically acclaimed new book, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy, Mariana Mazzucato calls for a public debate about what is really adding value to our economies so that we can create a new form of capitalism that works for us all.

Join us for a discussion with Mazzucato as she demonstrates how companies from Silicon Valley to the financial sector to big pharma have used foggy notions of value to create confusion between rents and profits—thereby allowing themselves to be portrayed as value creators, while in reality they are merely moving existing value around or, even worse, destroying it.

Only by debating and ultimately reclaiming the true meaning of value will it be possible to generate a fairer economy that benefits all of society. As Martin Wolf wrote in the Financial Times, The Value of Everything is “a stimulating analysis of the underlying causes of inequality and growth which forces us to confront long-held beliefs about how economies work and who benefits.”

A reception, with light refreshments, will be held from 5:30–6:00 p.m.

Speakers

• Mariana Mazzucato is a professor in the economics of innovation and public value at University College London (UCL), and is founder and director of the UCL Institute for Innovation & Public Purpose.
• Jeff Madrick (moderator) is an author, the director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative, and a senior fellow at The Century Foundation.