In this article I want to introduce readers to Professor Mariana Mazzucato, whom I consider the world’s worst economist. Some may have already heard of her, or recognise the face – she is often invited to give her take on shows like BBC Newsnight and Channel 4 News. Even so, she isn’t exactly a household name – something I intend to try and remedy given the huge amount of damage she is causing to the U.K. and Western economies.
Mazzucato is Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, a role which often sees her jetting off around the world to impart economic advice. Some examples of work trips last year:
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In between jollies to Columbia, Spain and Brazil, I somehow doubt the World’s Worst Economist ever puts up a shelf, paints a ceiling or steam cleans the bathroom floor.
Farmers, engineers, builders, electricians and plumbers are the saviours of humanity, a parasitic urban economist is Director of the Universal Calamity London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.
I’ll wager never done a proper day’s mission in her life.
Someone on here was asking the other day where all the jobs have come from that were lost with the loss of manufacturing, mining and with automation. Some have moved into service industries and other sectors that do useful stuff, and others have moved to bullshit like this. The Lord preserve us from people who want to save the world. A lot more jobs in the “charitable” sector too I reckon.
Planet savers, climate claptrappers and charity giggers all funded by public money, luxury-beliefers and bungs from loaded green twerps on the make.
Our council has a £500K/year staff budget for DEI and climate change but can’t afford to grit side streets. Firmly ensconced on the “active travel” bandwagon, and who can blame them, when national government throws money at them? At least I don’t live in Sheffield, where the city centre’s dead but they’ve put in a Dutch roundabout. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
What is a Dutch roundabout?
You might regret finding out as it will do your head in.
What is a Dutch roundabout?
The new layout includes zebra crossings at each arm of the roundabout, giving pedestrians priority over vehicles. There will also be a dedicated cycle track around the roundabout, with vehicles required to give way to cyclists at all arms of the roundabout.22 Oct 2024
Having worked for councils I can tell you that while most sane people would think this is a total waste of money and that gritting the roads would be a better use…BUT the way council budgets work – other than there being no thanks for saving money – is that if the money is not spent on what is set out for then it doesn’t get spent at all. Most money at councils is from the government. At London councils the transportation budget comes from Transport for London so you must do what they want to get the funding. Councils that can get money from developers can have autonomy on spending it although the s106 agreement does direct the spending. I did a spell at Westminster where they had the huge advantage of never having to pay for street improvements as with all the big estates being present they always paid for the areas around their developments to be improved.
Brilliant stuff!
The world’s worst economist is not a complete lunatic
“The problem is when the consulting industry is built on a business model, which almost by definition needs desperate governments,” Mazzucato told me. For many in the industry, “there’s no incentive to actually strengthen and make independent the government entity you’re working with, because then you won’t have the follow-on contract”.
However the giant lacuna in her argument is her idea that huge parastatal companies including huge defence companies, pharmaceutical companies and, in particular, ‘consultancies’, that all derive the bulk of their income from the state, are private sector organisations. They are not, in any real sense. The government may longer possess, for example, a ‘golden share’ in BAE Systems but it gave that up only because it is not required. BAE Systems, Rolls Royce and so many other massive corporations are still state run in all but name, senior managers ex civil service/public sector. They dance to the government’s tune. Their management structure mirrors that of the defence procurement civil service department on which it depends. That’s why their performance, outside of a European war (since the start of 2023, BAE stock is up 37%) is so dire.
So she is pretty close to coming across as a few sandwiches short…..
‘Mission oriented management’ is just another load of old management buzz word hooey…..reheated ‘matrix management structure’.
To put it politely: missions and statements mostly don’t work because they are rarely in touch with reality. That is because the people creating them are not those involved at an operational level and do not much involve those engaged at an operational level.
Consequently, both ‘missions’ and ‘visions’ are very often hopelessly unrealistic, given where an organization currently stands; Starmer’s ‘mission driven’ government being a classic case in point.
Does anyone else think the world’s worst economist (in the clip above) sounds very much like a recently failed U.S. Presidential Candidate……?
Nicely summarised, thanks.
Some of her phraseology seems to come straight from the Kamala Harris playbook. Perhaps they had the same mentors?
Hasn’t Rachel from Accounts already won the title of World’s Worst Economist? Or maybe she didn’t qualify for the competition, not being an economist..
She had a diary clash with the World Chess Championships.
They are a group who have falsely elevated Economics to a science equal to Physics which they can use to precisely predict and model the future. Pull a lever here, push a button there, and their massive brains can surely control vastly complex, chaotic, non linear systems with infinite variables, as surely as putting on your trousers. Its all snake oil…
Way back when I was first employed I managed issuing invitations to tender for work and then payment to successful contractors. One of the big procedural changes brought in was to do a ‘post audit’ of the larger completed contracts to ‘learn lessons’.
Is there any chance that any of the works under the ‘missions’ are subject to a post audit? Or would we find that much hot air and government (our) money had been frittered away for no purpose?
And epidemiology, climatology, paleoclimatology (the Hockey Stick), and any number of other voodoo sciences, have been pulling off the same cheap trick for decades.
Whereas established physical science is self-evidently true. Witness the functioning world of machinery, instrumentation and devices consequent upon Newton’s Laws of Motion, Maxwell’s Equations and Quantum Mechanics.
Gather 10 economists in a room and get 11 economic opinions is a saying I have heard.
Buffoons like this will soon be asked to explain why Sterling is getting a belting, while borrowing costs are rising fast….as that nasty beast called Reality crashes into their Fantasy world.
I think that our “leaders” regard reality as being “far-right”.
The Left these days inhabit a clown world of make believe.
Bloke.
That’s exactly what I thought, especially her thick neck and square chin, but her wiki page says she’s married with 4 children.
A poly-paedophile??
[Sorry for the silly joke but I can rarely resist wordplays.
]
If you could interview parasitic wasps I’m sure they’d would come out with exactly the same newspeak ‘mission’ statements, all whilst flying around the world feasting on their hosts till they’re dry husks.
What a grifter.
She is also very much an oxygen thief.
“fight cancer, help Europe adapt to climate change, protect seas and rivers, promote carbon neutral cities and foster soil health”……..All the stuff that saw massive EU farmer protests.
Government Missions are not remotely new. They are the tools of the authoritarian and have been tried hundreds of times before by such greats as Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pott etc etc. On the most famous in history was China’s “One Child” Mission. Not working out so well now…
It gets ever harder to reach any other conclusion than that politics attracts the worst kinds of vanity. Individuals drunk on their own hubris. Why do we ever believe them?
Only difference is now they use warm and fluffy words that get the ignorant masses on board with the deception. Gaslighting!
Notice on the Missions for Renewal poster how childlike it is. This is something UK Column picked up on in 2020, that there were so many Covid posters that were treating the public like children.
I think patronizing is a better description. Nobody’s going to ask the people living in Camden what their problems actually are. In particular, there’s no way for them to state something like “I think everything’s mostly fine as it is, thank you for asking”. Instead, it’s decreed that they suffer from lack of diversity and representation in decision-making, environment that’s detrimental to health, energy-inefficient buildings, lack of access to nature and quality outdoor space and that change is urgently needed to address that. That’s really a generic political program which probably comes from the UN (or a similar organization) and since Camden is readily available, it should better conform to such expectations (… or else!).
from what I gather reading this at first glance, this lady played a part with all those plant pots where there used to be parking spaces in 2020. best thing about it was a funny old geezer who smashed one up in a HGV, and his excuse was, well it wasn’t there before!
Some background on “mission-driven”: This is based on imitating Prussian/ German military tactics between 1866 – 1945 because of their spectacular successes nobody had ever considered possible¹. So-called mission tactic (Auftragstaktik) states that leaders should issue directives stating goals to achieve and coordinate allocation of resources among groups with different missions but not dictate the exact way how their subordinates are supposed to accomplish the stated goals. But if the missions are fight cancer, help Europe adapt to climate change, protect seas and rivers, promote carbon neutral cities and foster soil health ie, bullshit², bullshit, bullshit, bullshit and bullshit, using the proper buzzword alone obviously won’t help. Leaders still need to pick sensible and achievable goals, not just dish out money and other resources to independent teams doing whatever they want.
¹ Eg, Entente attacks with massive superiority in artillery and ammunition and with infantry superiority of as much as 16:1 had consistently failed to come even close to breaking through the German lines during WWI. Yet, the Germans managed to do just that in March 1918 within just three days of fighting.
² In practice, fighting cancer obviously doesn’t mean fighting cancer in the sense of curing cancer – this would be politically highly inconvenient if it was possible. It means more aggressive persecution of smokers and – for good measure – vapers, more aggressive anti-drinking campaigns and possibly, other similar so-called public health interventions.
So “missions” are the exact opposite of what is required, which are “systems”, in which “leadership” is a dirty word, the system is in charge, not leaders.
These “Institutes” are prostitution, universities sell their (supposedly) good name, getting money in return for “hosting” the institutes. No doubt they believe that these institutes also provide virtue.
Other examples: The Environmental Change Institute at Oxford, and The Grantham Institute at Imperial College.
How about Toby approaches unis to host a Free Speech Institute? I would help fund it, just to watch the impact on the wokerati.
Please have a close look at the sixth illustration in this article, which is a prime example of Anti-White Visual Propaganda.
Out of the 21 depictions of “British” people, including two hands, only 6 are Indigenous Brits, and the one large Indigenous “hand” represents White People handing over the money (“Grant-giving”).
Of the 6 Indigenous Brits, 3 are women: one redhaired, obese and unemployed; one redhaired and physically disabled in a wheelchair; and one white-haired and old, being lectured to by a young Ethnic Indian with dyed brown hair. Notice how one other apparently brown-haired man has darker skin.
The two White Males have brown hair, and one appears to have an Ethnic Indian woman as his wife. Not a single blond appears anywhere among the 21 people supposed to represent the London Borough of Camden.
All the Third World Ethnics are depicted as “vibrant”, “vigorous” and “industrious”, while the Ethnic Europeans are on the way out: obese, disabled, old, or practicing miscegenation.
Ripe for The Great Replacement.
You can also see this if you renew a photo ID or licence with the same photo: now your pale, stale white face will have a darkening filter over it, to make you look more Indian, while the Third World Ethnics have lightening filters over their photos, or selective photoshopping of a sports team or group photo, making the white people look darker, and the Third World Ethnics look lighter.
The Coudenhove-Kalergi “Bronze Race” plan in action.
I’ve noticed this, too, but sort-of expected it, as this was too good an opportunity depict Khan’s idealized “real London” where ethnic Europeans simply don’t figure (except maybe as not otherwise mentioned toilet cleaners).
You also missed one: The final Camden picture is titled “We make Camden!” and it shows three people. The left one is Indian (or similar) and probably a woman, the right one an African muslim woman (most muslims are rather white, too, but since that’s still the accursed colour, it mustn’t be mentioned). Both have their hands raised and seem to hold something I’d call an action box, indicating that these are the people of the future who actually do stuff. The person in the middle is a white man with his arms crossed behind is back in a waiting position. He’s (still) there, but clearly not involved in doing stuff.
It’s important to realize that this doesn’t show things as they are (for one, muslim women don’t usually do stuff outside of very traditional female roles) but as the audience is supposed to believe them to be and/or as the people who designed this really want them to be.
BTW, I congratulate you to your attention to detail. I wasn’t planning to mention this because I didn’t believe anyone but me would consciously notice it and it’s best to avoid “weirdo conspiracy theories”, ie, talking about stuff nobody seems to notice. My father certainly wouldn’t have and would have accused of being a “weirdo conspiracy theorist” if I had tried to point this out to him. This I know all too well.
Oh yes, I did miss that final Camden one— thank you for pointing it out. I first started noticing this Anti-White Visual Propaganda years ago in local government information leaflets, and even wrote to complain about it, though it continued apace.
It’s part of “The Totalitarian Two-Step”, as the much-maligned David Icke called it: Two Steps Forward, then One Step Back. They do something blatant until people complain, then they appear to retreat, and then they wait a while, then they sneak forward again. Evil comes back again and again.
By the way, as for Muslims being “rather white”, it’s important for us all to remember that the most fundamental genetic characteristic of Ethnic Europeans (= “White People”) is that
THEY CANNOT HAVE TRUE BLACK HAIR.
They can have very dark brown hair that may look almost black, but it lightens in sunlight, and is not the true black of Ethnic Africans, Ethnic Indian Subcontinentals (which includes the Muslim/Arabic types), or Ethnic Oriental people. 93% of humanity have true black hair, all over the world.
If Barbados wishes to have reparations then they can have it if they repatriate back to Africa and Barbados returns to full UK ownership. Perhaps Ms Mottley hasn’t noticed she and her reperationistas have been gifted a beautiful island along with infrastructure and a thriving tourist economy, that they run themselves. On this island they do not have to face fellow Africans whose ancestors captured and enslaved Ms Mottley and co ancestors, but perhaps reparations and repatriation can fix that and she can seek closure by facing those African slavers?
Thomas Sowell gives an excellent example of the stupidity wealth redistribution.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OtU7Yq5VZ_s
Don’t be too hard on her/him. Bit soul destroying knowing that nobody takes any notice of anything you say, mission or otherwise, unless you’re handing out cash
These are the 80% people. The ones that Musk fired when he took over Twitter.
“Take away the energy-distributing networks and the industrial machinery from America, Russia, and all the world’s industrialized countries, and within six months more than two billion swiftly and painfully deteriorating people will starve to death. Take away all the world’s politicians, all the ideologies and their professional protagonists from those same countries, and send them off on a rocket trip around the sun and leave all the countries their present energy networks, industrial machinery, routine production and distribution personnel, and no more humans will starve nor be afflicted in health than at present.
Fortunately, the do-more-with-less invention initiative does not derive from political debate, bureaucratic licensing, or private economic patronage. The license comes only from the blue sky of the inventor’s intellect. No one licensed the inventors of the airplane, telephone, electric light, and radio to go to work. It took only the personally dedicated initiative of five men to invent those world transforming and world shrinking developments. Herein lies the unexpectedly swift effectiveness of the design-science revolution. Despite this historical demonstrable fact, world society as yet persists in looking exclusively to its politicians and their ideologues for world problem solving.”
Buckminster Fuller
She appears to be a cross between Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey and Kamal Harris. “Word salad” doesn’t even begin to describe the utter vacuity of her utterances. Words fail me. Her words certainly fail her as they make Zero sense in her net Zero fantasies.
Share this article on BookFAce and it’s removed as SPAM within 2 minutes. Looks like Mark has some more redundancies to issue…
This is a very good example of the ruling elite that hover around institutions like the UN and WEF. The characteristics are always the same, highly educated, unaccountable to anybody, living an executive lifestyle jetting around the world, all funded with your tax funds, having easy access to elected governments influencing policies. There are literally tens of thousands of these elites that have found an easy way to make a living at the public trough. There are over 100,000 non profits and (fake) charities registered in Britain most providing executive lifestyles to a few at the top. Add the billionaire class with their philanthropies and it is no wonder that our governance is in such disarray and turmoil. This will not stop until the abuse of the treasuries through fake tax deductions and direct funding is stopped.
In the 21st century, surely these must be Mazzucato’s E-missions?