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The Value of Everything
Mazzucato's 2018 book — Making and Taking in the Global Economy — tracing how economic theory lost the capacity to distinguish value creation from value extraction, and what this loss enables.
The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy, published in 2018, systematized the distinction between value creation and value extraction that Mazzucato's earlier work had deployed selectively. The book traces the intellectual history of value theory from Aristotle through the Physiocrats, Adam Smith, Marx, and the neoclassical turn, showing how mainstream economics progressively abandoned the analytical framework for distinguishing productive from unproductive activity. The consequence is a theoretical apparatus that treats all market transactions as presumptively value-creating so long as willing parties transact — rendering invisible the structural differences between activities that produce genuine welfare improvements and activities that extract surplus from those improvements without corresponding contribution. Applied to contemporary economies, the framework illuminates how financial sector returns, platform monopolies, and rent-seeking intermediaries are treated as equivalent to productive innovation in standard economic measurement.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's intellectual project is recovery. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations carefully distinguished