PERSON
Mariana Mazzucato
The economist who proved that the state is not a market-fixer but a market-maker—and whose diagnosis of public risk, private reward is the sharpest available instrument for understanding who actually paid for the AI revolution.
Mariana Mazzucato is the economist who gave the word
entrepreneurial back to the state. For a generation, innovation policy was organised around a single story: the private sector takes risks, creates value, and deserves the returns; the public sector corrects market failures and otherwise steps aside. Mazzucato demolished that story with receipts. Her 2013
Entrepreneurial State traced the funding genealogy of every major technology in the smartphone—GPS, touchscreens, the internet, Siri—and demonstrated that the device celebrated as the supreme achievement of private genius was, in its foundational technologies, a product of public investment. From that foundation she built a framework powerful enough to diagnose the AI transition in real time:
public risk, private reward is the structural template that explains why the lab-coats who built deep learning on public grants earn academic salaries while the firms that commercialised their work command trillion-dollar valuations. She founded the
Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at UCL to operationalise that diagnosis into policy, and