newspeak

By invitation: Mariana Mazzucato: Startup myths and obsessions | The Economist.

Possibly paywall protected.

But Mazzucato’s thesis is fairly well known, by now–she has been tireless in promoting it–but for all that, it’s not seemingly altered the perception of how tech startups work, or rather, get to working. But maybe I’m just missing changes in the rhetoric of tech entrepreneurialism, on either side of the Atlantic.

Or perhaps not. Though Mazzucato counsels the UK gov’t. and its opposition, still, this is how she finishes her article:

What we need if we are to avoid the much-feared “secular stagnation” is not many small startups—or an obsession with financing “SMEs”–but an innovation ecosystem in which these new firms are made relevant through a dynamic interaction of public and private investments. This requires a public sector able and willing to spend large sums on education, research and those emerging areas that the private sector keeps out of (because of high capital intensity and high technological/market risk); large firms which reinvest their profits not in share-buybacks but in human capital and R&D; a financial system that lends to the real economy and not mainly to itself; tax policy that rewards long run investments over short run capital gains; immigration policy that attracts the best and the brightest from around the world; and rigorous competition policy that challenges lazy incumbents rather than letting them get away with high prices and parasitic  subsidies.

Unfortunately the current situation is a very lonely one for the startups.  More revolution, less celebration is needed.