Mariana Mazzucato
Economist whose work on value creation versus value extraction revives the classical distinction between productive activity and economic rent.
Overview
Mariana Mazzucato (b. 1968) is an Italian-American-British economist at University College London, known for The Value of Everything (2018) and her work on the role of the state in innovation. Her central theme — the difference between creating value and extracting it — directly revives the classical and Georgist concern with economic rent.
Relevance to Georgism
Mazzucato argues that modern economies increasingly reward value extraction — rent-seeking through finance, intellectual property, and land — over genuine value creation, and that national accounting wrongly counts much extraction as production. With Josh Ryan-Collins and Giorgos Gouzoulis she authored "Mapping Modern Economic Rents" (2023), a framework spanning land, finance, and digital-platform rents.
Significance
Mazzucato brings the language of rent-seeking into mainstream policy discourse, providing contemporary intellectual support for taxing rent rather than production — even where she does not frame it as Georgism.
See Also
Sources
- Mazzucato, Ryan-Collins & Gouzoulis (2023), "Mapping modern economic rents" — wiki summary
- Mariana Mazzucato (2018), The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (book).