Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Economist and director of UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, known for prize-winning books on value and innovation.
On the island
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.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:42You 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
1:49You 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 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.
Presenter asks
5:54You 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
9:19You 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
16:09Your 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
19:36One 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.”