Styled as a “how to” guide for policymakers,
Mission Economy is a radical call not to do away with capitalism, but to “mend” it, said Tom Kibasi in The Guardian. Unbridled free market policies, Mazzucato suggests, have produced a range of ills – and an inability to tackle big problems collectively. Her remedy is to bolster the state, enabling it to rediscover its “entrepreneurial role”. As part of her “mission economy”, governments would define “grand challenges” then set “missions to solve them in partnership with business”. Her book is a welcome “shot in the arm”.
Mazzucato’s goals may be laudable, but her thinking is too often simplistic, said Emma Duncan in The Times. Despite what she claims, the state today is far from “minimalist”: in normal times, it accounts for nearly half of all economic activity, and even without radical remodelling is capable of leading “moonshot projects” – as it has successfully done with the Covid-19 vacci
The novel opens with the narrator and his wife agonising over whether to terminate a pregnancy – because their baby almost certainly has a rare genetic abnormality. They opt for an abortion, and later have a son – who in his early years is “slow to develop”. In “deceptively simple, pared-back” prose, the narrator details all the “difficult emotions” this engenders.
“This is a complicated story, told with fearless honesty,” said James Smart in The Guardian. Although funny at times, it has a “thoughtful frankness” that can “stop you in your tracks”. In depicting it as “baffling, traumatic and transformative”, Ho Davies’s portrait of fatherhood feels refreshingly true to life.