The Value of Everything by Mariana Mazzucato may be of some interest: > In modern capitalism, value-extraction is rewarded more highly than value-creation: the

The Value of Everything by Mariana Mazzucato may be of some interest: > In modern capitalism, value-extraction is rewarded more highly than value-creation: the productive process that drives a healthy economy and society. From companies driven solely to maximise shareholder value to astronomically high prices of medicines justified through big pharma’s ‘value pricing’, we misidentify taking with making, and have lost sight of what value really means. Once a central plank of economic thought, this concept of value – what it is, why it matters to us – is simply no longer discussed. * https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-value-of-everything https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-value-of-everything > In this scathing indictment of our current global financial system, The Value of Everything rigorously scrutinizes the way in which economic value has been determined and reveals how the difference between value creation and value extraction has become increasingly blurry. Mariana Mazzucato argues that this blurriness allowed certain actors in the economy to portray themselves as value creators, while in reality they were just moving existing value around or, even worse, destroying it. > The book uses case studies - from Silicon Valley to the financial sector to big pharma - to show how the foggy notions of value create confusion between rents and profits, a difference that distorts the measurements of growth and GDP. * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29502362-the-value-of-everything https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29502362-the-value-of-ev... One interesting anecdote she brings up: the US government gave a $456M guaranteed loan to Tesla, which Tesla paid back. But now that Tesla is "successful" and Musk is super-rich, does the US government get any credit for helping its success? How much 'value' did the folks at Tesla create versus the US government in helping to fund it? Her previous book, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, also has an interesting thesis: > This book debunks the myth of the State as a large bureaucratic organization that can at best facilitate the creative innovation which happens in the dynamic private sector. Analysing various case studies of innovation-led growth, it describes the opposite situation, whereby the private sector only becomes bold enough to invest after the courageous State has made the high-risk investments. * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17987621-the-entrepreneurial-state https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17987621-the-entrepreneu... * https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state