Mission Economy (book)

Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, published in 2021, extended Mazzucato's framework from diagnosis to prescription. The book argues that the most effective historical role for government investment has not been correcting market failures but setting ambitious missions — specific, publicly defined objectives that direct collective effort toward goals the market alone cannot identify or organize. The Apollo program did not land a human on the moon by regulating the aerospace industry. It set a mission and directed public investment toward achieving it. The advances produced — in materials science, computing, telecommunications, life support — generated commercial spillovers across industries that bore no relation to space travel. The commercial returns were not the purpose. They were the byproduct of mission-oriented public investment whose primary target was a publicly defined objective. Applied to AI, the framework implies that public investment should be organized around specific missions — climate adaptation, health equity, educational access — rather than around undifferentiated support for AI development that the market will direct