Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Lauren Laverne
Economist and director of UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, known for prize-winning books on value and innovation.
Eight records
I was born in Italy from parents who were quite progressive. We often talked about the need to challenge ideas. And the history of the fascists in Italy is still very present in the memories of many Italians. And we used to sing Bella Ciao in the car going on holiday. And so I didn't choose Bella Ciao, but I chose The Partisan by Leonard Cohen, which is about a very similar era. And I just love it. First of all, because I just think Leonard Cohen has, I think, the sexiest voice ever. But also because my husband also comes from a family whose part of the family was killed during the resistance in Italy when a young partisan boy escaped. He was one of the people who had to blow a whistle when they saw the German tanks coming. And then he ran away from the tanks and ran inside the farmhouse of my husband's grandmother's home. And so the men who were making bread were all killed because they were punished for having allowed this young boy to hide.
So I've chosen Aguas de Marso, which is a beautiful song about the rainy period, March, in Brazil. And it's a fantastic song because it's sung by two people, Elise Degina and Tom Jobim. And if you watch, if you can, one of the videos when they sing it together, they are just having so much fun. So I was asked by the Brazilian government to help them around their thinking around innovation policy, rethinking, for example, how the public bank, BNDS, was operating. You know, many times I would leave London thinking, ah, you know, I'm so glad I'm going to Brazil, because I would go maybe two, three, four times a year, and I'd arrive, and it'd be raining. And I would have left London. That was sunny. But then I'd be walking on the beach in Rio. It doesn't matter if it's rain or shine in Brazil. It's a real fantastic country with so much history. And on the beach in Rio, I'd also be thinking very much about these policies that we were talking to the government about.
So the next track is Hook by Blues Traveler, which was a band set up by John Popper, a classmate of mine from Princeton High School. And he was actually, I think, used to play trumpet in the Princeton High School studio jazz band. And he then convinced the teacher, Mr. Biancosino, to let him play Harmonica. Now, Mr. Biancosino, you might know, was the main character who inspired Whiplash. Whiplash about that evil music teacher. So I think it was Damien Chazelle, who was actually younger than me, so he was the director of Whiplash. But Mr. Biancucino was not as mean as that film portrays him to be, but he definitely was super perfectionist, and he ended up producing incredible musicians like John Popper, but also like Chris Barron of the Spin Doctors, Laurie Berkner. So I had lots of really, really talented schoolmates. But what was wonderful was that these were areas, the arts, that were really invested in. But literally, the harmonica of John Popper is probably the best harmonica I've ever heard played.
So the next track is Which Side Are You On?, which is sung by Natalie Merchant, but it was actually written in 1931 by Florence Rees, who was the wife of Sam Rees, a union organizer for the United Mine Workers in Harlan County, Kentucky. And I love it both because I really like Natalie Merchant's voice, but also the title of the song, you know, Which Side Are You On? When things go wrong, we academics are always trained to sound objective. You always have to say the pros and cons, and you can't really sort of take a strong position. With the current state of the world where we have climate change to the point that the recent IPCC report tells us that we've got 12 years left until that struggle is completely lost, and where we have this whole problem of inequality where the 1% really have been able to extract a huge amount of value, not because they are particularly intelligent, but because we've actually allowed also through bad policies if you want for that to happen. I do think that we need to not so much choose sides, but be really clear in pointing fingers in such a way that then allows us to highlight the problem, that then, of course, we must throw our full analysis behind it. But it's just a really refreshing song. You know, which side are you on? Take a side, and then, of course, throw your full power of your analysis behind it.
'Round MidnightFavourite
Round Midnight by Thelonius Monk, who I absolutely love. First of all, I just love Monk, and this particular song Round Midnight reminds me a lot of my lonely but also exciting PhD years in New York. For me, this song is very much about roaming the streets of New York, thinking about when will my PhD finish. But also, I was lucky that when I was in Boston for my undergrad, I lived, at least for part of those years, in a particular part of Boston called Inman Square with lots of jazz bars. And I became a jazz fanatic. And this song is just one that I could listen to over and over and over with lots of wine.
La Forza del Destino – Overture
Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Claudio Abbado
The sixth disc is La Forza del D'Estino, The Overture, by Giuseppe Verdi. I find this extraordinary. It's a mix of so many different emotions, and one of those is basically the music in The Godfather. When you listen to this, just ask yourself, have I heard this before in a movie? And Nina Rotta, who did the music for The Godfather, must have been massively inspired. But I heard quite a bit of Verdi when I was working in Vienna, 1993. I was working in the Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, learning complexity theory. And I was spending very little money. I think they still didn't have the Euro at that time, so it must have been a shilling or two to get the worst seats possible in the Vienna Opera House. And I think I must have gone at least four or five times a week with sandals, t-shirts, after work. And then similarly, during my PhD in New York, I managed to get to the Met with a student pass and heard lots of opera. But this particular piece, I think, is extraordinary due to the variety and how modern it was.
So I've been living in the UK for almost twenty years in one particular neighborhood. Camden in London. And so I've chosen a song by Amy Winehouse, who I think was a real genius. So I've chosen a song from her first album, Frank, Amy, Amy, Amy. I think it's actually my favorite album because it's the rawest. I think it really kind of epitomizes her the most.
A song called La Bambola, which means the doll by Patti Bravo, a wonderful singer from Italy. And you know what? I can't say why I chose this except to say that I love singing this song. I often sing it under the shower, and especially moments of, you know, when you come home, kind of trudging up the stairs and get your glass of wine. This is a song I like to sing with my daughters out loud together and just laugh.
The keepsakes
The book
Marguerite Yourcenar
there's one book that I just love opening up to any chapter, and I just relax right away. And that's Memories of Hadrian by Margarita Ursenar, who wrote about the life and death of the Roman Emperor Adriano, Hadrian. And it's incredible because she somehow writes in this incredibly poetic way the urgency that he felt in terms of leading the responsibility, but also incredibly meditative, just really thinking deeply about love, poetry, music, philosophy, and also his passion for his lover, a man called Antonio.
The luxury
I'd use both to lie on to make shade but also to wrap myself in my mother's love forever.
In conversation
Presenter asks
You are professor for economics of innovation and public value. What does that mean for those of us who don't have economics degrees?
So innovation, in my view, is really just about structural change. Basically, capitalism is different from feudalism because feudalism was about 500 years of inertia, not much change. And so understanding how that change came about collectively through different types of actors, not just in the private sector, also in the public sector, but also in civil society. So trade unions have been extremely important for co-shaping and co-creating markets. That's something I'm extremely interested in. And then this word, public purpose, as well as public value. It's very interesting because the word value is so narrow.
Presenter asks
You are looking at who creates value in our economy, who extracts it, and also current assumptions about value, which you see as flawed. Why?
I talk about Plato. I start with Plato, where he said that storytellers rule the world. And so really, what I'm trying to do is unveil how so many ways that we think about value in economics really are just stories. And that's okay, because actually economics is not a natural science. It's not like physics about atoms and molecules. It's about people. It's a social science. So by actually highlighting the way that we talk about value and wealth, it's important also to be able to contest those words. And so, you know, Lloyd Blankfein, after the crisis, I think it was in 2009, he was the CEO of Goldman Sachs. He said that Goldman Sachs workers were the most productive in the world, the biggest value creators. This is one year after the crisis. And so the question is: how do we measure productivity? What do we mean by some workers being productive, others not? What are the, you know, what's the self-fulfilling prophecy that the way that we actually allow certain parts of the economy to feel that they're creating value then also makes others feel a bit, you know, maybe we should just get handouts.
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Speaker 2
BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
Presenter
Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs Podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.
Presenter
Professor Mariana Matsukato is an economist. She's the director of the University College London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and the author of prize-winning books tackling the biggest questions in economics, more than a few of which keep philosophers and creative types up at night too. What is value? Who controls it in our society and our economy? Where does innovation originate? Her proposals for a healthier economy are on a similar scale. They include transforming the way we view the role of the state, a new approach to taxation, and reshaping the pharmaceutical industry. So, the big stuff. A public intellectual with an ever-increasing profile, she's captured the interest and influenced the approach of politicians and industry leaders from around the world and across the spectrum, though they may not always like what they hear. She says, There are lots of wrong policies and wrong ways to run public institutions, but there's nothing deterministic about it. Looking at the narratives used to justify certain choices and debunking some of them is how I see my role. That's especially important today. Professor Mariana Matsukato, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thanks so much. I'm very happy to be here. So you're professor for economics of innovation and public value. What does that mean for those of us who don't have economics degrees? So innovation, in my view, is really just about structural change. Basically, capitalism is different from feudalism because feudalism was about 500 years of inertia, not much change. And so understanding how that change came about collectively through different types of actors, not just in the private sector, also in the public sector, but also in civil society. So trade unions have been extremely important for co-shaping and co-creating markets. That's something I'm extremely interested in. And then this word, public purpose, as well as public value. It's very interesting because the word value is so narrow. Well, exactly. And this has occupied you with a lot of your recent work, concentrating on Oscar Wilde's famous conundrum, defining value. So you are looking at who creates it in our economy, who extracts it in our economy, and also current assumptions about value, which you see as flawed. Why? I talk about Plato. I start with Plato, where he said that storytellers rule the world. And so really, what I'm trying to do is unveil how so many ways that we think about value in economics really are just stories. And that's okay, because actually economics is not a natural science. It's not like physics about atoms and molecules. It's about people. It's a social science. So by actually highlighting the way that we talk about value and wealth, it's important also to be able to contest those words. And so, you know, Lloyd Blankfein, after the crisis, I think it was in 2009, he was the CEO of Goldman Sachs. He said that Goldman Sachs workers were the most productive in the world, the biggest value creators. This is one year after the crisis. And so the question is: how do we measure productivity? What do we mean by some workers being productive, others not? What are the, you know, what's the self-fulfilling prophecy that the way that we actually allow certain parts of the economy to feel that they're creating value then also makes others feel a bit, you know, maybe we should just get handouts. So it's unpicking narratives, but also looking at language and how we use them. I mean, a key part of that. Absolutely. And so one of the questions I ask is: what happens when we actually, in some ways, reverse the logic from theories of value to theories of price to a theory of price, so supply and demand curves.
Speaker 2
Well exactly.
Presenter
which then tells us what is valuable. So in GDP, for example, we only include what has a price without really a judgment of is this actually creating value in the economy? Or is it just extracting it? Is it even perhaps destroying it?
Presenter
Time for some music, Mariana Mattucato. Tell me about your first choice today. Why have you chosen this one? I was born in Italy from parents who were quite progressive. We often talked about the need to challenge ideas. And the history of the fascists in Italy is still very present in the memories of many Italians. And we used to sing Bella Ciao in the car going on holiday. And so I didn't choose Bella Ciao, but I chose The Partisan by Leonard Cohen, which is about a very similar era. And I just love it. First of all, because I just think Leonard Cohen has, I think, the sexiest voice ever. But also because my husband also comes from a family whose part of the family was killed during the resistance in Italy when a young partisan boy escaped. He was one of the people who had to blow a whistle when they saw the German tanks coming. And then he ran away from the tanks and ran inside the farmhouse of my husband's grandmother's home. And so the men who were making bread were all killed because they were punished for having allowed this young boy to hide.
Speaker 3
When they poured across the border, I was cautioned to surrender. This I
Mariana Mazzucato
I could not do.
Mariana Mazzucato
I took my gun and vanished.
Mariana Mazzucato
I have changed my name so often.
Mariana Mazzucato
I've lost my wife and children, but I've many friends.
Presenter
Leonard Cohen and the partisan. Mariana Matukato, you talk about the need for a mission-orientated approach to enable change. Can you unpack that for us a little bit? Sure. Well, let's just think a minute about the Man on Moon mission. So the mission was to get to the moon and back again in a generation. And if you read the speech, actually, speeches that Kennedy gave about that inspirational challenge, both to the Irish Parliament, I think it was in 1963, and other speeches like the one he gave in Houston, you know, he actually, if you break down what he was saying, no politician speaks like that today. It was like, you know, this is going to be difficult. We will probably fail along the way. We're going to have to throw a lot of money at it, but that's okay. And what he was addressing was a big challenge at the time, which of course was the space race. But it was very concrete. Get to the moon and back again in one generation. Then if you look at how they did it, it required lots of different sectors to interact. It was not just aeronautics. They had to invest in new textiles, new types of nutrition. You couldn't just wear jeans and a t-shirt and get to the moon and eat a hamburger, right? So all sorts of different types of investments in innovation. And then, again, in order to do that, they required lots of different projects. So the bottom-up experimentation, over 200, 300 different projects, of which, again, many failed. So the question is, what would it look like to apply that same sort of concrete but challenge-oriented, intersectoral, interdisciplinary, interactor, bottom-up approach towards solving concrete challenges that are about rethinking green transition for the economy, the future of health, not just in terms of medicine, but well-being, the future of mobility in our cities?
Presenter
Why can't we do that?
Presenter
Time for some music. Um what are we going to hear next? Tell me why you've chosen this track.
Presenter
So I've chosen Aguas de Marso, which is a beautiful song about the rainy period, March, in Brazil. And it's a fantastic song because it's sung by two people, Elise Degina and Tom Jobim. And if you watch, if you can, one of the videos when they sing it together, they are just having so much fun. So I was asked by the Brazilian government to help them around their thinking around innovation policy, rethinking, for example, how the public bank, BNDS, was operating. You know, many times I would leave London thinking, ah, you know, I'm so glad I'm going to Brazil, because I would go maybe two, three, four times a year, and I'd arrive, and it'd be raining. And I would have left London. That was sunny. But then I'd be walking on the beach in Rio. It doesn't matter if it's rain or shine in Brazil. It's a real fantastic country with so much history. And on the beach in Rio, I'd also be thinking very much about these policies that we were talking to the government about.
Speaker 2
Epau, E Pedro, El Findo Camino. Elo esto dito, tempo sosino. Em cato dividro, e vide elusó. Eno ye amocha, e la sanzo. E pero va du cam.
Mariana Mazzucato
Uh
Speaker 3
Don't match it up very early.
Mariana Mazzucato
Uh
Speaker 3
Uh
Speaker 2
You might be
Speaker 3
How'd you fail? Uh Diamonds
Mariana Mazzucato
Uh
Speaker 3
Yeah.
Speaker 2
That
Speaker 3
Uh
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Mariana Mazzucato
Okay, I don't know Uh Yeah.
Presenter
Aguas de Mosso sung by Elise Regina and Tom Jabin.
Presenter
I want to go back a little bit uh quite a bit actually to the beginning. You were born in Rome, but you spent your childhood in America and your father's work was what took you there. Tell me a bit more about that. So I was born in Rome and actually stayed there for five years.
Presenter
And I followed my father and my mother with my siblings to Princeton, New Jersey. My father is a nuclear fusion physicist. So fusion is the good thing. It's when they try to bring hydrogen atoms together. Fission is the bad one, which gets us the atomic bomb. So we moved to Princeton in 1973, which is a nice suburb about an hour outside of New York City. Very, very green.
Mariana Mazzucato
Yeah.
Presenter
It was a fantastic place to grow up. It was also an era where the public education system, the state education system, was still.
Presenter
One that was not just invested in, but if you came from basically any family of any class background, you wanted to send your kid to Princeton High School. It was the best high school to go to. And the high school I went to had students that were both sons and daughters of luminaries from the Institute for Advanced Studies, which is where Einstein worked, the university, but also from working families. In fact, there were many Italian working families. Princeton University itself was built by workers from a small town in Molise, a poor area of Italy, called Petranella, because they were very good at cutting pietre, so stones. And when Princeton wanted to copy Cambridge, then Princeton went to get these great Italian stone cutters who built the university. And in fact, the Italian Americans in the community now are still prevalently both from that area and also from Ischia, a small island off of Naples. Let's go to the music then, Mariano Maticato. Tell me about your next track. So the next track is Hook by Blues Traveler, which was a band set up by John Popper, a classmate of mine from Princeton High School. And he was actually, I think, used to play trumpet in the Princeton High School studio jazz band. And he then convinced the teacher, Mr. Biancosino, to let him play Harmonica. Now, Mr. Biancosino, you might know, was the main character who inspired Whiplash.
Presenter
Oh.
Presenter
Whiplash about that evil music teacher. So I think it was Damien Chazelle, who was actually younger than me, so he was the director of Whiplash. But Mr. Biancucino was not as mean as that film portrays him to be, but he definitely was super perfectionist, and he ended up producing incredible musicians like John Popper, but also like Chris Barron of the Spin Doctors, Laurie Berkner. So I had lots of really, really talented schoolmates. But what was wonderful was that these were areas, the arts, that were really invested in. But literally, the harmonica of John Popper is probably the best harmonica I've ever heard played.
Presenter
Hook, blues traveler. Mariana Matticotto, you told me about your dad earlier. Let me ask you about your mum. She had studied science too, but arrived in the US speaking only Italian. How did she adjust to life there? She had finished her degree at the University of Pado in political science, where she had looked at what was happening in Italy at the time, which was the banning of psychiatric hospitals. And I think it was really an area that she would have liked to continue working in. But, you know, she was with three little kids in a country where she couldn't speak English at the time. We couldn't speak English at the time. And she had to settle her new young family in Princeton while her smart husband was doing his nuclear fusion stuff. And she slowly became an incredibly integral person of the community. She ended up teaching adults Italian literature, and the students loved her work so much that at her memorial, people spoke about her who had taken her class for 25 years. And when I heard that, I was like, damn, like, does that mean you just failed the class for 25 years? But she was so good. She really brought together people from so many different areas. Believe it or not, John Nash, you know, from A Beautiful Mind, the great mathematician, came to her memorial. He actually also took her cooking classes. I think it already existed, but she basically revolutionized it, something called the Dorotea House, which is an Italian cultural institute in Princeton.
Mariana Mazzucato
Yeah.
Presenter
Where both literature, but cooking, and also great poets, Italian scientists would come and basically reveal the greatness of the Italian culture to the Princeton community. But again, people of all walks, so both the Italian janitors, the Italian gardeners, the Italian physicists would come, and people from all walks of life in Princeton. And John Nash did take my mother's cooking classes. Let's go to the music. Tell me about your next piece of music. So the next track is Which Side Are You On?, which is sung by Natalie Merchant, but it was actually written in 1931 by Florence Rees, who was the wife of Sam Rees, a union organizer for the United Mine Workers in Harlan County, Kentucky. And I love it both because I really like Natalie Merchant's voice, but also the title of the song, you know, Which Side Are You On? When things go wrong, we academics are always trained to sound objective. You always have to say the pros and cons, and you can't really sort of take a strong position.
Presenter
With the current state of the world where we have climate change to the point that the recent IPCC report tells us that we've got 12 years left until that struggle is completely lost, and where we have this whole problem of inequality where the 1% really have been able to extract a huge amount of value, not because they are particularly intelligent, but because we've actually allowed also through
Presenter
You know, bad policies if you want for that to happen. I do think that we need to not so much choose sides, but be really clear in pointing fingers in such a way that then allows us to highlight the problem, that then, of course, we must throw our full analysis behind it. But it's just a really refreshing song. You know, which side are you on? Take a side, and then, of course, throw your full power of your analysis behind it.
Speaker 3
Come all you good workers, good news to you out town.
Speaker 3
How the good old Union has come in here to dwell
Mariana Mazzucato
Hello
Speaker 3
Which sad are you on, boys? Which sad are you on? Which sad are you on, boys? Which sad are you on?
Presenter
Natalie Merchant, and which side are you on? Mariana Matukato, your latest research is looking at the pharmaceutical industry, and you assert that it pursues profit rather than public health objectives. What's your evidence for that? Well, you know, one could actually argue, well, let them do what they want. Companies can maximize profits, and if they want to, you know, do so by producing medicines that cost a lot of money and make a lot of profits, then fine. But actually, if you look at the research that leads to these medicines, a huge percentage actually comes from the public sector. So the question is, why have we then allowed the profit motive to rule the way that, for example, prices are set, but also the governance of the process when actually all this public money is going in it? And the underlying question is, could we actually do better? Could we actually restructure the way we innovate in this sector? So we A, produce drugs that are actually needed, because so many of the drugs that are coming out of the health innovation system are really just slight variations of existing drugs. We call them Me Too drugs. But also the prices being set are just astronomic. Just recently, the price of an antibiotic in a company called Nostrum Pharmaceuticals went up by 400% in one week. And when the CEO was asked, you know, how could you do this? People die if they don't have access to that antibiotic. What happened exactly? He said, well, we have the moral imperative for our shareholders to allow prices to rise what the market will bear. It's extraordinary that then that sort of passes for an excuse when this is actually a sector where a very high percentage, often three-fourths of the research spending actually comes from the public sector. The medical situation varies from country to country. You mentioned the U.S. What about the NHS and the prices that they are with? Well, we wrote we should have a stakeholder, not shareholder, governance of the system. And the stakeholder, of course, would be NHS, NICE, the Medical Research Council in this country, and the pharmaceutical companies. But currently, unfortunately, so much of the value that really is co-created then gets captured downstream by the companies, which are allowed to set prices, which again are not reflecting this much more collective effort.
Mariana Mazzucato
Well, we
Presenter
Time to go to the music. What are we going to hear next, Mariana Matugato? Round Midnight by Thelonius Monk, who I absolutely love. First of all, I just love Monk, and this particular song Round Midnight reminds me a lot of my lonely but also exciting PhD years in New York. For me, this song is very much about roaming the streets of New York, thinking about when will my PhD finish. But also, I was lucky that when I was in Boston for my undergrad, I lived, at least for part of those years, in a particular part of Boston called Inman Square with lots of jazz bars. And I became a jazz fanatic. And this song is just one that I could listen to over and over and over with lots of wine.
Presenter
Delonious Monk and Round Midnight. Your ideas are extremely radical, and I'm wondering about the people who are intimidated by them or the people who they upset. One newspaper headline, I believe, called you the world's scariest economist. What did you make of that? And how did you earn that title, do you think? I thought it was very funny, actually, because the journalist was a woman, and the article was fantastic. So, if you read the article, I don't sound scary, but then the people who chose the headlines were men. In fact, she even complained. And at first, I was a bit angry myself, but then I thought, no, actually, it's great. It's a great title because people should be scared. The economy is scary. We currently have, for example, the same level of private debt to disposable income.
Speaker 3
Blank
Presenter
That we had just before the crisis. And guess what? That's what caused the crisis. We ended up obsessing about public debt, but private debt was the cause, and we are back at that level, and that should be scary. This is a time of anxiety. You know, you referred to Kennedy and the space race and the inspiring speeches then. You know, that was a time of optimism. And we're in a different age now. Well, actually, I think we, again, it depends where you look, but we have the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations SDGs. There's 17 of them, but 169 targets underneath them. And over 100 countries have signed up to them. That's pretty optimistic. That's never happened in the past. We've actually signed up to together globally, forget the fact that Trump, as usual, now tries to be an oddball, to this amazing agenda. The question is: how do we actually do it? It's not enough.
Mariana Mazzucato
Well, actually.
Presenter
Just to do the talk around hunger, inequality, and climate change. We need to actually create a road mapping. I'm currently actually working with different parts of the UN, including UNDP, around this. What would it look like to create a roadmap to actually really tackle these SDGs together across society? And you said that you're an optimist. I mean, how optimistic are you that you're going to reach that goal?
Presenter
Well, me alone?
Speaker 2
No.
Speaker 3
Well
Presenter
I think it's possible. I think well, first of all, we really need to recognize that countries are very different. So some countries right now, unfortunately, are obsessed with their internal politics and problems, of which, of course, Brexit in the UK is one of them. But there are also different countries right now, including China, which is spending $1.7 trillion.
Speaker 3
I think
Presenter
Dollars worth on greening and its economy. And a little country like Denmark has been able to capture that as an opportunity. So, Denmark today is the number one provider of high-tech green services to China's green economy. So, again, that's a 1.7 trillion budget that they can service. How cool is that for a country that's basically the size of London? Time to go to music. What are we going to hear next? Tell me about your sixth disc today. The sixth disc is La Forza del D'Estino, The Overture, by Giuseppe Verdi. I find this extraordinary. It's a mix of so many different emotions, and one of those is basically the music in The Godfather. When you listen to this, just ask yourself, have I heard this before in a movie? And Nina Rotta, who did the music for The Godfather, must have been massively inspired. But I heard quite a bit of Verdi when I was working in Vienna, 1993. I was working in the Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, learning complexity theory. And I was spending very little money. I think they still didn't have the Euro at that time, so it must have been a shilling or two to get the worst seats possible in the Vienna Opera House. And I think I must have gone at least four or five times a week with sandals, t-shirts, after work. And then similarly, during my PhD in New York, I managed to get to the Met with a student pass and heard lots of opera. But this particular piece, I think, is extraordinary due to the variety and how modern it was.
Presenter
The overture from Verdi's opera La Forza del D'Estino performed by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Claudio Abbado.
Presenter
So, having spent a lot of time thinking about value when it comes to the economy, I wonder how you assess the value of academic research and collaboration. Is it something that you can easily quantify? It's definitely not easy. And so much research actually leads to nothing, both if you're thinking about the pharmaceutical research we were talking about before, but even more so if we're thinking about astronomy, physics, but also the economy and sociology. And so, researchers must be able to always have their blue sky science where they're rewarded also for taking risks and pushing the frontiers, which may actually potentially lead to nothing, but at least that effort has to be captured, as well as all the spillovers. So much research actually ends up finding its benefits in unexpected areas. So, how will leaving the European Union change things? I mean, Britain's leading universities like to position themselves as global powerhouses of research. Will they still be able to do that sufficiently? Well, there will be a large hole in terms of the funds that British researchers have benefited from up until now. So, we are the net gainers in terms of the framework program called Horizon. Basically, European Union research funding has been massive. And we simply don't have currently the budget within the UK government that's going to fill that hole. But also, we shouldn't forget this isn't just about research, this is about patient long-term finance that has also been coming from the European Investment Bank. That's been in the billions, and that's also potentially going to go. And, of course, it's not just about money, it's about collaboration. So, both through the Erasmus programs, but also through the different collaborations that occur through the funding. So, the funding is basically also stimulating the collaboration, not just the absolute amount of research funds. If we become less dynamic in that sense, so collaborate less, then of course science suffers. Science has always benefited massively from people of different sorts working together. Let's have some more music. What are we going to hear next? Why have you chosen your seventh disk today?
Presenter
So I've been living in the UK for almost twenty years in one particular neighborhood.
Presenter
Camden in London. And so I've chosen a song by Amy Winehouse, who I think was a real genius. So I've chosen a song from her first album, Frank, Amy, Amy, Amy. I think it's actually my favorite album because it's the rawest. I think it really kind of epitomizes her the most.
Speaker 2
Attract me Until it hurts to concentrate Distract me
Presenter
Stops me doing work I hate it And just to show him how it feels I walk past his desk and heels One leg resting on the chair
Speaker 2
From the side he pulls my hair
Presenter
Yeah.
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Speaker 2
Uh Although I've been here before.
Presenter
Amy, Amy, Amy by Amy Winehouse. Mariana Matsukato, the economics arena is still very male-dominated, isn't it? I mean, the UK has had two female prime ministers, three female home secretaries, but not a chancellor. Why not? There's no good answer to that question. And of course, if we look at some of the leaders right now of the IMF, Christine Lagarde and other women leaders, obviously nothing's impossible. It is an area, so economic theory, more than some of its applications, and definitely more than business studies, which has been much more woman-unfriendly, if you want, than some of the hardest areas of the hard sciences, physics. There's more women in physics than there is in economics. Part of it, I think, is, and this is just my conjecture here, I have no evidence for this, but that it is quite a bit of an ideological field. We're not really applying the scientific method in this area, which would be that you have a problem out there somewhere, and then you throw your full set of tools at that problem. We actually decided, for example, to use those tools which actually proved what we wanted to prove of how capitalism works. So in some ways, one could argue that maybe women have been less attracted to areas which have just been so susceptible to ideology less than perhaps some of the other more applied areas of the field. I definitely think we need to change that. So definitely getting more women in the, not just the top jobs, but in the.
Presenter
Top field would be good.
Presenter
Now, I'm about to cast you away to our island. I wonder how you'll get on there. You'll be all on your own, desert island. How do you think you'll cope? I love swimming, so I think I would spend most of my time in the water. Are you a wild swimmer? This is going to be tidal. I am a wild swimmer, but not as wild as my friends who I go with. I recently, at least, from October onwards, put on a wetsuit, and they'll look at me like I'm a wuss.
Mariana Mazzucato
But you will
Mariana Mazzucato
Gonna be tie verb.
Mariana Mazzucato
I'll look at
Presenter
So, if I'm on a desert island, I'll spend definitely most of my time in the water. You're also a keen cook. You mentioned your mom's sensational cooking earlier. Would you be able to rustle something up, do you think? Definitely. It might be harder to bake, but yeah, I'm a big baker with my girls. Instead of playing play-doh, which I thought was just completely useless, all these toys that you just end up having to clean up, cooking with them from early on. So, yeah, I would definitely cook stuff up. Fish, love fish, fish, do a little barbecue. I could do that. Tell me about your eighth disc today. What's it going to be? A song called La Bambola, which means the doll by Patti Bravo, a wonderful singer from Italy. And you know what? I can't say why I chose this except to say that I love singing this song. I often sing it under the shower, and especially moments of, you know, when you come home, kind of trudging up the stairs and get your glass of wine. This is a song I like to sing with my daughters out loud together and just laugh.
Speaker 2
Fajirar, tumi fajirar, kome fosiuna bambola.
Speaker 3
Uh
Speaker 2
Upon And boo. Mm.
Speaker 2
Mibuti Jukome Fosiuna Bambola.
Speaker 2
Non tier di cuando piano cuando Please.
Presenter
La Bambola by Patty Bravo. So, Mariana Maticotto, I'm sending you away with three books. You've got the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. You can also have one of your own choosing. What will it be? So, for me, this was very easy. I didn't have to think about it. There's one book that I just love opening up to any chapter, and I just relax right away. And that's Memories of Hadrian by Margarita Ursenar, who wrote about the life and death of the Roman Emperor Adriano, Hadrian. And it's incredible because she somehow writes in this incredibly poetic way the urgency that he felt in terms of leading the responsibility, but also incredibly meditative, just really thinking deeply about love, poetry, music, philosophy, and also his passion for his lover, a man called Antonio. And Gustav Flaburg, who she mentions in the postscript, actually caught that mood also because he said that that was the exact period in which people no longer believed in the Roman gods, but also Christianity wasn't yet really established, so mankind was sort of alone and much more reflective. But we still had all the big challenges. It's a beautiful thought. You can also have a luxury item to make your time on the island more enjoyable. What would you like?
Mariana Mazzucato
The
Presenter
My mother made amazing quilts. She really applied her artistic sense and both cut the fabric, sewed them. So definitely one of her quilts. But if I can, I'd also bring the NHS, just in case I got sick. Can't allow you the NHS. Can help you out with the quilt.
Presenter
Okay, and the quilt I'd use both to lie on to uh make shade but also to wrap myself in my mother's love forever.
Presenter
And finally, which one of these eight disks would you save above all the others, do you think?
Presenter
Definitely around midnight. It's the only one that I could listen over and over and over without getting tired of it.
Presenter
Mariana Matugato, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you. It's so great to be here.
Presenter
Hello, I really hope you enjoyed that interview with Professor Mariana Matsukato. We have cast away many economists over the years, including Nigel Lawson, De Minu Shafiq, and Gordon Brown. Back in twenty thirteen, Kirstie Young spoke to the former Bank of England Governor and Economist
Speaker 3
Lord Mervyn King. This financial crisis then, that started, of course, in in two thousand seven, then and over the intervening years, what have been the moments that have really kept you awake at night?
Mariana Mazzucato
I don't think anything has kept me awake at night because my training, my reading of financial history meant that I knew exactly what we had to do. So for example when RBS got into serious problems and couldn't get to the end of the day and we knew that the banks wouldn't be able to survive the next day unless we did something, it was obvious what we had to do. We would have to lend money to that bank to an unlimited extent for a few weeks until the problems could be sorted out. So in that sense it was quite easy to know what to do.
Speaker 3
You mentioned RBS being rescued by the taxpayer. As we all know, they're currently recording losses of $5.2 billion. We've got the LIBOR fixing scandal, a continued failure of managing to get actual money from the banks to people who run small businesses and medium-sized businesses. Is it any wonder that the public have lost faith in the world of finance and banking?
Mariana Mazzucato
No, it's no wonder at all, and in many ways, when the crisis hit in two thousand seven eight, I was surprised that people weren't angry sooner.
Mariana Mazzucato
And I think you can see it coming through now as the impact on standards of living becomes more obvious and they have every right to be angry. But it is the case that banks are safer now. They've got more capital. They can absorb losses more easily than they could back in 2008 when they were extraordinarily fragile institutions. There's still some way to go. But this crisis wasn't caused by a few individuals. It was a crisis of the system of banking that we'd allowed to grow up.
Mariana Mazzucato
And it's very important that we don't demonise the individuals, but we do keep cracking on with changing the system. And we are now approaching the point when we will have put in place all the reforms that are needed to give us a much safer banking system that I believe will then behave in the right way. And I go to schools and speak to six formers and others, and I found before the crisis that a disturbingly high proportion of them, instead of wanting to become engineers or scientists or musicians, wanted to go and work in the city. Why? Because they wanted to make a lot of money. Now I think they don't really want to go and earn money if it's being earned in a way that creates enormous damage to the rest of society. And I think that's a very healthy thing.
Presenter
Lord Mervyn King talking to Kirsty Young. All those programmes are available to download. Next time, my guest will be comedian and TV presenter Alan Carr. I do hope you'll join us.
Speaker 2
Hello, I'm Saida Varsi, and I want to let you know that my new podcast is now available on BBC Sounds.
Speaker 2
I'm sick of Muslim women only being heard if we fit some preexisting narrative. Either we need to be saved by you or you need to be saved from us. I'm tired of only speaking about forced marriages or polygamy or burqas, always burqas. So I've been speaking to seven different Muslim women to hear what they want to say and about the many ways to be a Muslim woman in twenty first century Britain.
Speaker 2
The conversations are intimate, surprising, and sometimes shocking.
Speaker 2
I hope you'll join us and subscribe to How to Be a Muslim Woman on BBC Sounds.
Presenter asks
You talk about the need for a mission-orientated approach to enable change. Can you unpack that for us a little bit?
Sure. Well, let's just think a minute about the Man on Moon mission. So the mission was to get to the moon and back again in a generation. And if you read the speech, actually, speeches that Kennedy gave about that inspirational challenge… what he was addressing was a big challenge at the time, which of course was the space race. But it was very concrete. Get to the moon and back again in one generation. Then if you look at how they did it, it required lots of different sectors to interact. It was not just aeronautics. They had to invest in new textiles, new types of nutrition… And then, again, in order to do that, they required lots of different projects. So the bottom-up experimentation, over 200, 300 different projects, of which, again, many failed. So the question is, what would it look like to apply that same sort of concrete but challenge-oriented, intersectoral, interdisciplinary, interactor, bottom-up approach towards solving concrete challenges that are about rethinking green transition for the economy, the future of health, not just in terms of medicine, but well-being, the future of mobility in our cities?
Presenter asks
You were born in Rome, but you spent your childhood in America and your father's work was what took you there. Tell me a bit more about that.
So I was born in Rome and actually stayed there for five years. And I followed my father and my mother with my siblings to Princeton, New Jersey. My father is a nuclear fusion physicist. So fusion is the good thing. It's when they try to bring hydrogen atoms together. Fission is the bad one, which gets us the atomic bomb. So we moved to Princeton in 1973, which is a nice suburb about an hour outside of New York City. Very, very green. It was a fantastic place to grow up. It was also an era where the public education system, the state education, was still one that was not just invested in, but if you came from basically any family of any class background, you wanted to send your kid to Princeton High School. It was the best high school… And the high school I went to had students that were both sons and daughters of luminaries from the Institute for Advanced Studies, which is where Einstein worked, the university, but also from working families. In fact, there were many Italian working families.
Presenter asks
Your latest research is looking at the pharmaceutical industry, and you assert that it pursues profit rather than public health objectives. What's your evidence for that?
Well, you know, one could actually argue, well, let them do what they want. Companies can maximize profits, and if they want to, you know, do so by producing medicines that cost a lot of money and make a lot of profits, then fine. But actually, if you look at the research that leads to these medicines, a huge percentage actually comes from the public sector. So the question is, why have we then allowed the profit motive to rule the way that, for example, prices are set, but also the governance of the process when actually all this public money is going in it? And the underlying question is, could we actually do better? Could we actually restructure the way we innovate in this sector? So we A, produce drugs that are actually needed, because so many of the drugs that are coming out of the health innovation system are really just slight variations of existing drugs. We call them Me Too drugs. But also the prices being set are just astronomic. Just recently, the price of an antibiotic in a company called Nostrum Pharmaceuticals went up by 400% in one week. And when the CEO was asked, you know, how could you do this? People die if they don't have access to that antibiotic. What happened exactly? He said, well, we have the moral imperative for our shareholders to allow prices to rise what the market will bear.
Presenter asks
One newspaper headline called you the world's scariest economist. What did you make of that? And how did you earn that title, do you think?
I thought it was very funny, actually, because the journalist was a woman, and the article was fantastic. So, if you read the article, I don't sound scary, but then the people who chose the headlines were men. In fact, she even complained. And at first, I was a bit angry myself, but then I thought, no, actually, it's great. It's a great title because people should be scared. The economy is scary. We currently have, for example, the same level of private debt to disposable income that we had just before the crisis. And guess what? That's what caused the crisis. We ended up obsessing about public debt, but private debt was the cause, and we are back at that level, and that should be scary.
“I talk about Plato. I start with Plato, where he said that storytellers rule the world. And so really, what I'm trying to do is unveil how so many ways that we think about value in economics really are just stories. And that's okay, because actually economics is not a natural science. It's not like physics about atoms and molecules. It's about people. It's a social science.”
“I do think that we need to not so much choose sides, but be really clear in pointing fingers in such a way that then allows us to highlight the problem, that then, of course, we must throw our full analysis behind it. But it's just a really refreshing song. You know, which side are you on? Take a side, and then, of course, throw your full power of your analysis behind it.”
“We currently have, for example, the same level of private debt to disposable income that we had just before the crisis. And guess what? That's what caused the crisis. We ended up obsessing about public debt, but private debt was the cause, and we are back at that level, and that should be scary.”
“I love swimming, so I think I would spend most of my time in the water. I am a wild swimmer, but not as wild as my friends who I go with. I recently, at least, from October onwards, put on a wetsuit, and they'll look at me like I'm a wuss.”
“There's one book that I just love opening up to any chapter, and I just relax right away. And that's Memories of Hadrian by Margarita Ursenar, who wrote about the life and death of the Roman Emperor Adriano, Hadrian. And it's incredible because she somehow writes in this incredibly poetic way the urgency that he felt in terms of leading the responsibility, but also incredibly meditative, just really thinking deeply about love, poetry, music, philosophy, and also his passion for his lover, a man called Antonio. And Gustav Flaburg, who she mentions in the postscript, actually caught that mood also because he said that was the exact period in which people no longer believed in the Roman gods, but also Christianity wasn't yet really established, so mankind was sort of alone and much more reflective.”