Putting life at the center of the economy, instead of the economy at the center of life.

We had it and we lost it. According to Mariana Mazzucato, the USA showed precisely how to energize and motivate an entire country and its economy in the 1960s. Today’s USA shows no signs whatsoever of that spirit. It is everyone for themselves, and public institutions have become liabilities instead of levers. Mazzucato’s The Mission Economy is a delightfully positive, thoroughly thought through, universal solution to what ails capitalism. It is an object lesson in solutions hiding in plain sight.

It was President John F. Kennedy who, fearing the USA was falling behind the USSR, suddenly pledged to land Americans on the moon before the end of the decade. He acknowledged this would be risky and expensive, but he knew in advance it would send the US economy in all kinds of new directions. Some 400,000 people worked on the project. It led not only to major advancements in information technology and computers, but even to management methods as companies found they needed to communicate freely with competitors and their own employees. The economy boomed. And men walked on the moon.

Today, Mazzucato says, we desperately need a mission like the moon landing to not only give the economy a focus, but also to solve major overhanging problems the country cannot address through…