Marianna Mazzucato Draws Attention To A Forbes Article – The Wrong One

There is a small difference – OK, not so small – between publicity, propaganda, and actual science. The sciencey bit is that you acknowledge and then try to deal with criticisms of the hypothesis being put forward. Propaganda usually involves trying to avoid doing so, publicity ignoring it.

At which point, from Professor Mazzucato:

The link is to this piece, a piece which says that Professor Mazzucato is fabulous.

Around here we prefer, from the same source, Forbes, this piece which implies that Professor Mazzucato is less than fabulous.

What perversion of logic is this? Our original definition of public good, the very one we use to support the idea that there should be government involvement, is that we cannot profit out of the provision of public goods because of their nature. Now, magically, a change of ownership means that we can make a profit from what we formerly could not?

What Mazzucato has done here is morph the work “public good” from its technical meaning over into something much closer to “public service”, or “goods provided publicly” both of which are very different concepts from the first. And this matters: for there are indeed, as above, very good arguments why there should be governmental support for public goods in that technical sense. But to use those arguments to support public provision of private goods is a very naughty little logical trick indeed.

This provided as a public service of course. Even, to offer a bit of that sciencey stuff, the ability to consider cases against the original hypothesis.