Thursday, December 10, 2015

Mariana Mazzucato — No more nudges – only an entrepreneurial state can give us a green revolution

Signals and nudges to the private sector will not get us where we need to go. If we are to have a green revolution, characterised by the kind of sweeping and widespread technological changes that characterised the IT revolution, then we need to learn the right lessons. More nudging is fudging it. Instead, states around the world must act boldly and courageously to tilt the playing field in the right direction.
Battling climate change requires efforts on multiple fronts: pushing and pulling, not nudging, both on the supply side, such as investments in R&D and innovation, and on the demand side, including changing consumption and investment patterns, and enabling diffusion and deployment.
Green innovation requires not only massive amounts of private spending on R&D, piloting and deployment, but also public investment and public sector agencies willing to take on risks in the most capital intensive and high risk areas. This public support should not be limited to basic research but must extend right along the innovation chain, as I have shown was the case with the IT, biotech and nanotech revolutions.…

But, but but, the government has run out of munnie according to POTUS.

Green Alliance Blog
No more nudges – only an entrepreneurial state can give us a green revolution
Mariana Mazzucato | RM Phillips professor in the economics of innovation, SPRU, University of Sussex

2 comments:

NeilW said...

Mariana is by far the best advisor on these matters.

It makes perfect sense to have a publicly funded university research system churning out open patents in everything that the private sector can then exploit to turn into products.

Ignacio said...

/sarc ?