Economist explains why Britain's economy is set up to fail | Mariana Mazzucato interview
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ก.พ. 2023
- Mariana Mazzucato is a Professor at University College London and the author of the newly released The Big Con.
Interviewer: Oli Dugmore
Camera: Joel Dunn-Wilson, Harry Ainsworth
Follow us on TikTok:
www.tiktok.com/@politicsjoe?l...
Follow our Instagram:
/ politicsjoe
Follow PoliticsJOE on Twitter:
/ politicsjoe_uk
Subscribe for more videos:
th-cam.com/users/PoliticsJOE?s...
Want more from JOE? See our other channel:
/ joecoukvideos
The NHS is probably the greatest example of an organisation suffering from tampering by politicians advised by business consultants. From the Salmon report to Lansley's obsession with outsourcing, resulting in longer waiting lists and a top-heavy management structure. [Politicians + business consultants = a fatal combination.]
Agreed
Infuriating that governments from Thatcher onwards have insisted on fixing what, before her time, wasn't broken.
Fixing the NHS now is necessary & requires immediate return to pre-Thatcher model asap
The NHS and the BBC were examples of what well run self managed state wide organisations can achieve, and sadly are now examples of what the dead hand of party politics and the conservatives can bring about by trying to optimise their chances of being reelected in any and all decisions which they make.
PPE FFS ?
Is government healthcare, obviously it is under the influence of politics.
@@anteekoNO! It's public healthcare: a public service under government stewardship, yet the Tories break that trust to promote more privatisation for their failed ideological reasons. Ie. We need stewardship, not meddling. (How about a citizens assembly having a say, guided by health experts?) This government should be prosecuted for treason.
@@davidmcculloch8490 "(How about a citizens assembly having a say, guided by health experts?)"
The problem is how you do that without having cost exploding out of control.
You need some free market and competition to force cost down.
People who pointed this out thirty years ago, were called communists, publicly attacked, cut out of the political process etc.
Today we have witnessed the spoiled fruits of this bad policy, but we still have to deal with political opposition from the feeders.
It's so interesting to see someone as intelligent and academically minded as Professor Mazzucato also be so engaging and charismatic. It's not that often that someone can combine those two aspects, which is so important because she can reach people with these important discussions who would otherwise not stay for dry discourse from the normal academic-type.
I believe a big part of the problem is the way our government views the population. It has a very low opinion of us. It doesn't value us highly, has no ambition for us, and worse destroys any ambition we have in ourselves. We deserve a government that can treat us with respect and warmth
I used to discuss economics and politics in the pub with a guy who was a consultant, who lived by me. After much discussion, I eventually got him to admit that his main objective was to get more business from companies by telling them what they wanted to hear. If he should happen to tell them that their management systems and strategy were the cause of the company's woes, he wouldn't hear from them again, which he had experienced.
As a lifelong consultant I can confirm what your pal said.
Besides - if a guy really knew some vital business-transforming secret, why would he sell that knowledge to someone else, instead of just going into biz as a competitor and making a killing?
For completeness, I'll repeat ya that old old joke. A shepherd is out with his flock when up roars a BMW, and out steps a dark-suit gent with a briefcase. "Can we make a bet? If I tell you how many sheep are in that flock, can I have one?" "Sure". So Mr.Suit gets out his snazzy phone, consults various satellite images etc., then says: " 471". "True" says shepherd. Mr. Suit instantly bundles an animal in the back of the bimmer. Shepherd says: "Just as a return bet, if I can tell you what your job is, I can have it back?". Mr. Suit says ok. "You're a management consultant." Amazed, Mr. Suit asks shepherd how he knew. "Well, (i) no-one asked you to show up here out of the blue, but here you are; (ii) you answered a question that I never asked and to which I already knew the answer anyway; (iii) you don't know $hit about my business. Now, give me back my dog!"
@Aussie Pom what does that have todo with anything, except taking a below the belt shot at people going to a gym? Lmao get a life
Fantastic interview, and a really important book.
Also, I really appreciate her genuine shout out to her Phd student who coauthored her book.
Global Government baised onthe
United Nations Charter ...
@@stephensampson9208 good
@@stephensampson9208 “global”is not the issue, it’s whether the global refers to the health of the planet, the wellbeing of population of the world and even distribution of resources, or global in terms of huge corporations and worldwide billionaires.
@@stephensampson9208 I’d actually prefer a world government that works together for the benefit of everyone. Not just for a handful of countries that reap all the benefits through exploitation. Not one world leader, but having all the countries come together. But I’m a dreamer.
My younger brother worked as a consultant fresh out of university in a field totally unrelated to his education. There's no way he had any expertise to offer, he was hired because of class basically.
He looked good and liked to "play" with others, eh?
This world makes me 🤢
He now works at a major bank and is training as a trader. Also nothing to do with his education in any way.
@@AdamTaylor-tw2vm - that doesn't matter so much at the beginning of a career. It's a problem later on. Graduates are at their most employable fresh out of university and are usually quite malleable.
That is very true but the larger consulting firms hire Ivy League grads right out of college for a number of reasons and they typically partner them with more senior consults (they do have industry experts that have experience). However, the whole consulting industry is wrought with a lot of issues. Often they are like the two in the movie Office Space, they are just looking to streamline a companies budget by recommending layoffs (that is the fastest way to increase a companies profits). What they don't see (or refuse to see is the affect on morale, even with employees that are retained). They did the same with the US Post office for years, consulting firms recommended hiring tens of thousands of non federal employees to work in the Post Office (the effect has been a disaster). So now the Post Office is reversing that decision in some areas.
@@stephenconnolly1830 Whilst I would tend to agree would that still stand in a consultancy role? Most people move into consultancy after long careers in the field they have become experts in.
I’ve seen one consultancy in action and it went like this:
The Old School in a company who were experts were locked in a kind of war with the Business School Grads who knew very little, except HRM theory. The two sides could no longer talk to each other. So the Consultants passed on the Grads’ ideas to the Old School and the Old Schoolers’ ideas to the Grads. As there was some merit in both sides, the ‘Consultants’ Advice was very sound and the company did fabulously well.
The Consultants earned a mint out of the company and no damage was done.
They got credited with the company’s success. But had no ideas of their own at all. That was probably fortunate.
That's consultancy in a nutshell. Lend me your watch and I'll tell you the time.
"Socialize the risk, privatize the rewards." Don't think I've ever heard Capitalism explained so clearly.
That’s socialism. Capitalism privatises the risk and privatises the reward.
@@realityalwaysbulliesopinio1961 Talk about missing the point! 😆
@@realityalwaysbulliesopinio1961 This video went a bit over your head, didn’t it?
It's a very old phrase. Around since before 2008 when it was used to describe the bank bailouts back then.
@@kaymish6178 Early 1970's. It used to referred to as Lemon Socialism
She rocks, 5mins and I’m captivated👌
Great woman who speaks the truth and listening to her is a pleasure
Great public intellectual. Her book, The Value of Everything is great and this one sounds pretty wonderful. She is dead right about about consultancy. The dependency relationship is set up not to solve problems per se, but to continue using consultants. Insanity.
I have shared/posted and spread this one around a bit - very important content - I have been an NHS employee present during the use of consultants on more than one occasion. They NEVER make anything better. They burn a lot of money and they 'prove' the things we'd already told them. Mariana, thank you for at least telling our story.
I just related a story like this the other day. Didn’t get much comment. I think it’s one of those things everyone knows, but treats like it’s a myth. But it doesn’t seem to be a myth. It seems true. They are just a ripoff.
Today I met an ex-nhs colleague who now works for KPMG… all power to him but what are we doing!?
There are many times over the past 5 or 10 years when i've asked myself, where are the people who really understand the modern economic problems? where are the experts and what are the actual solutions to the issues we face? It just turns out that the media doesn't spend any time promoting academics and current thinkers who understand modern issues at all, and for this reason i find myself enjoying this channel more and more, since it isn't confined by the ancient TV media rules. Oli always seems to ask pointed questions and gives interviewees a great space to discuss their views. Great job to everyone involved.
Really enjoyed this conversation, great insights and thought provoking words, great job everyone x
Keir Starmer should reach out to this woman, she would be a real asset.
He will not, because she advised Jeremy Corbyn... so by purely partisan instinct, he won't; though of course what she also mentioned about the way in which subcontracting to consultants expanded under New Labour will have a bearing on Starmer's decision.
Starmer loves Mckinsey etc
She sounds quite positive about Starmer. Not quite so convinced he won't go down the line of using the big Consultancies personally..
@@Patrick-jj5nh yea i was going to say! this lady is a consultant and i remember her on Question Time years ago saying the gov needs to sell NHS data
She’s too left wing for him. He wants someone that sounds tory
Nice to see some actual sense from an economist on the channel again. I know it's not your fault but Martin Wolf from the FT was fairly woeful.
He got taken to the cleaners this morning by Kate Raworth and Bernie Sanders on BBC Start the Week. Worth a listen.
I heard Mariana on Novara and now I'm listening to her audiobook :)
Thanks for the tip, listening now and it's a pretty interesting discussion.
Also interesting to hear how someone who seems to come from the more Hayekian liberal capitalist (basing that just on the way he talks about both Socialism and Capitalism and his implicit definitions of those terms, I don't know that much about him) tradition seems to have, from the force of sheer reality over the last couple of decades, ended up in his actual policy prescriptions as akin to something of a moderate social democrat.
Maybe that's a little uncharitable, and least he should be complimented for being adaptable and taking on new evidence to inform his worldview, but you do wonder that, if he revisited the foundational texts of his youth without the baggage of allegiance and comfort, whether he might not find the narrative and arguments so compelling any more. Especially if he also read a few socialists, rather than taking his understanding of what "socialism" is from the "when the government owns stuff" school of recycled Hayekian critique that's the best part of a century out of date at this point.
And I did find his Joe interview interesting and insightful at times even if I didn't agree with a lot of it. It's certainly valuable to hear how an intelligent person in that sort of neoliberal tradition makes sense of the last few decades of global capitalism, not least because, like it or not, that is the tradition that most of the governing elite of the 3 biggest parties in England also come from, and the language they speak.
He is at least a lot more analytical and thoughtful than 99% of the neoliberals and neoliberal adjacent types who inhabit a large swathe of the UK political sphere, most notably at the moment the leadership of the labour party.
@@Muzikman127
Thanks for the comment.
I was feeling much like you until I heard him on Start the Week. You should listen. He gets to talk a lot but when he is trying to make an argument against Kate Raworth and Bernie Sanders - OMG he is sooo wrong.
The moment that crystallises perfectly his fundamental error comes towards the end of the discussion.
He recognises that money buys power and, then says it had been like this for the entire history of human society. Then, like some kind of fantasist, he says something like "our mission must be to divorce money from power."
It's was a ludicrous statement given that a) that is almost logically impossible in principle and b) he had just himself conceded that this was unprecedented in human history.
Meanwhile, rational people would say something completely different that is at least possible in principle - I.e. stop individuals piling up huge fortunes of money in the first place. Democratise wealth to democratise society.
Sure you won't get perfect equality and I doubt anyone even wants that. But limiting the maximum wealth in society to something halfway sensible like, say $100M, would go 95% of the way to dealing with oligarchy.
But Martin Wolf simply cannot conceive of something like this.
The most frustrating part is that people like Wolf think they are the sensible ones. They think people on the left are wild eyed idealists. Meanwhile he is advocating a strategy that requires contradicting the precedent of ALL of human history!!! It seems obvious that HE and his ilk are the wild eyed idealists!!
@@michaelrch Shared the somewhat underwhelming impression you got , however he might simply be aware of the fact that selling a plan limiting maximum wealth to a 100M would be a doomed strategy and that a "divorcing money from power " plan might be a less worrying(albeit somewhat ludicrous ) goal .
Oh man, that interview made my blood boil and if you knew me you'd know that's hard to do. Thanks for the BBC tip, I'll go listen to it.
Thank goodness for this. Someone has addressed this issue, it’s the first time I have felt there is a chance of change in this disjointed society. I wait to see these ideas materialise in to action.
you'll be waiting a while
There will be no change without the political will to change. Let's face it - it ain't happening.
"... socialising the risk and privatising the reward..." that's the mess of many modern economic models.
I agree with this. I have worked for employers where I have advised them on issues and courses of action and have been ignored. They have paid consultants who have given the same advice and the company has acted.
On a micro scale, I recall that when working at an FE College in the UK, we had some 'Training and Development' days where a highly paid 'Consultant' came and gave us an entire day of corporate jargon and 'buzz words.' These days were not only boring, but not in any way relevant to teaching music - or any other subject, come to that. This is what such training days COULD and SHOULD have been there to help with:
* Classroom Management (behaviour management of unruly students)
* The Design and Implementation of the Curriculum - Schemes of Work, Assignements, learning outcomes, etc.
* How to obtain more teaching resources through increased funding (in my case musical instruments and enough teaching rooms)
* How to persuade the senior management of a college that your department should be allocated greater resources.
But we got none of that. Absolutely NOTHING which these consultants told is was useful, or appropriate to our situation, or even intelligable.
These freelance consultants must have been laughing all the way to the bank.
Part of the problem of consulting is that the best way to climb the corporate ladder is often to jump between consultancies and the people they consult. Individuals are then incentified to bring in consultants to their company even if it's harmful because it might be beneficial for their own career prospects.
Enjoyed this about as much as I did last night when I watched it on Novara Media 😉
Likewise but I preferred the structure of this interview tbh
Mariana Mazzucato is amazing. I could listen to her for hours! Thanks
That's do-able. Her book is on Audible :)
😄
It doesn't take a lot to dismantle conservative economics as completely idiotic and self serving
@left_blank "What's wrong with self serving" - When taken to the extreme, EVERYTHING!
"I don't work to make your life better" - Actually, you probably (VERY LIKELY!) do; you simply just don't realise it - for whatever reason...
@left_blank paying taxes is called civilisation. Civilised societies should have a social conscience, where the fortunate, support and care for the old, sick, weak and vulnerable.
You may be in that situation one day!
The only problem with the British tax system, is that the working classes are carrying the country, and the wealthy hoard their money, and don’t contribute.
Why didn’t you then instead of just making the claim?
@left_blank No, it’s a response to the original comment by Chris Spencer
@left_blank you get benefitted from publicly funded research (vaccines for instance), you get benefit from publicly funded education, you get benefit from publicly funded infrastructure, law enforcement, justice, defence, civil defence. You get benefit from you and your neighbours getting treatment for health conditions that do not then make your family ill.
Some of these can be provided at greater expense by private sector at the cost of increased social inequality and inefficiency (see US health system).
Your taxes are not stolen. They are your contribution to the cost of running our society.
I would add that opinion polls reveal that the general estimation of benefit fraud is greatly overestimated. Few people deliberately chose to live on benefits.
You have been getting some top interviewees recently. Excellent.
Mazzucato is obviously brilliant, and her topic is crucial. On a related, perhaps slightly more general note: her point about using consultants as a rubber stamp on knowingly harmful decisions connects to a broad problem of fuzziness in institutional procedure and official justice, born of situational convenience to institutions and their stakeholders. When a decision is unattractively clinical and based in purely material considerations such as cost saving, blanket it in moral concerns. When a decision is based in ideology or moralism or bigotry, blanket it in procedural imperatives. Watch for this in courts, in accounts of corporate malfeasance and official violence and corruption. It is a shell game, designes in both directions to shield the naked power relations at the heart of inequity and harm.
Bought the book, arrived yesterday and looking forward to reading it! I worked in the automotive vehicle development industry and it resonates with me as I have worked for a consultancy and also as their customer about 5 years ago and I had the same experience mentioned, it's a very refined confidence trick the customer never gains the know-how but gets a tick in the box, young graduates get thrusted into expert roles, con-sultancies get a license to make money and gives something both parties to hide behind each other.
Could you give us the ISBN number so that they rest of us can order it thank you.
Civil Servants with the actual expertise of working in an area over many years being shoved aside for consultants with no domain knowledge who cost double their pay, yet CS can't get a pay rise that keeps up with inflation 🙃
All this was warned against 30 years ago but no-one took it seriously. Now Management Consultants are killing this country.
Britain built its economy on the ready availability of cheap raw materials from its oppressed colonial empire. (For instance the Lancashire Cotton industry was built on the back of Slavery and prospered from Indian and Egyptian cotton).
Once the colonies regained their long forbidden freedom, Britain was forced to pay fair prices for those raw materials and couldn't compete.
Germany's colonial empire was of far shorter duration and Germany never became dependant on it the same way Britain became dependant on its own empire.
Britain has drifted from one economic crisis to the next primarily because it has never restructured or come to terms with the reality that the empire is over.
One remembers that before the Brexit referendum, EU sceptical journalists and politicians spoke of "reviving" the "Commonwealth". Even if Australia, New Zealand, Canada and (still White dominated) South Africa were willing (and all had long previously made alternative arrangements), Britain was "hoping" the Indians would "consent" to "British aid" (FWIW Indian "consent" was taken for granted and "British Aid" lead to the needless deaths of 100 million Indians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - while Britain prospered).
Indians were expected to fill the expected labour shortages after the xenophobic Brexiteers "removed" the Eastern European immigrants who were then keeping the NHS and other British institutions staffed.
Britain's economic woes will never end until they begin to recognise that
(a) They are a relatively small island off the coast of Europe
(b) They are NOT a World power.
(c) They can only get by in the World in cooperation with their neighbours
(d) Their neighbours are a very large Economic power, who can thrive very well without Britain.
(e) Cooperation depends on humility and arrogance is a huge turn-off.
As a descendant of the survivors of British imperial oppression, I must admit to enjoying the crap Britain and Britons are experiencing and can only say, "They've no one to blame but themselves".
If the problem is that companies have sought to maximise shareholder value since the 80s, what do you think they did before the 80s?
When I worked as a teacher we used to have consultants with power points talk to us about unicorns and fairies to help us teach. I can say they were as much use as a glass hammer.
As an FE teacher I live that every day of my life and have done so for the most part for the past 20 years.
I worked for a private company that got consultants in who did nothing more than interview the employees as to what THEY thought were improvements and then charged the company a small fortune. I left tearing my hair out but after seeing the same thing happen in the civil service I went self employed and that was 37 years ago.
The sound mixing seems pretty poor in this video :(
Started with the bad mic placement on Mariana... should have placed it centrally under her head...
I like this video of Mariana Mazzucato. So true and has been for the last 40+ years. I had an economist friend at university who looked at who generates wealth and who benefits. She pointed out the 97%/3% split of wealth, 97% of people sell their labor and 3% benefit from the other 97%... The wealth of the 3% is a drag on the world economy, the false view of trickle-down. Touted by the rich (and their Tory allies).
Its a system, and everyone plays their role. In that system, the confidence of capital cannot be threatened or everyone suffers.
The major problem behind all of this is that the money paid to consultants, advisors, private sector suppliers just disappears and there is never any traceability, follow up, adjustment, exposure and in fact the same agencies win contracts again and again. Pork barrel. Sickening.
I remember my professors telling us that the role of the consultant is to make the decisions that the big bosses don't want to make. That was supposed to be a secret. She is exactly right. There was a story of an audit done by the state auditor's office that found a million dollars was missing and it was done quickly and on the cheap. Anyway, the governor didn't like that so he hired Arthur Anderson at the time to run an audit that found a million dollars was missing, too, but it cost a million to do for the same result as the state auditor. Again, it is a failure of imagination with neoliberalism.
Great interview. Many thought provoking remarks. I'm glad that a well known academic like Mariana publishes a book which points at the absurdity of the consultancy model.
The NHS is literally spending their budget on over paid managers, paper pushers and D.I.E staff. Their budget has gone up 50 percent since the tories have been in power and they still can't get you seen in a reasonable time or pay the actual staff with the knowledge a decent wage. On their last budget increase, the government told them not to employ more managers, ect, but to pay the nurses they said no. Now they're encouraging strikes. It is private business being ran at loss but funded by the taxpayer. Theirs nothing socialist about our public heath service apart from the funding. Each gp, hospital region, dentists, care homes are private business already. The government has very little control.
“People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.”
― Alan Moore
Economic investigator Frank G Melbourne Australia is still watching this very informative content cheers Frank ❤
Loved the Dominic Cummings comment. Reading something doesn't mean understanding it!
Very good discussion.
What annoys me about the current consulting culture is. That the big consulting companies do not employ experts to consult, but fresh college graduates with only book knowledge, which anyone can read up on. Then these graduates are burnt out through overtime and the lack of any real accomplishments. And all that to provide a fig leaf for decision makers.
In my opinion any leader calling in one of the big consultancies ought to have their salary cut by the amount consulting costs.
I have myself experienced a corporate culture where you as a staffer research and present a well reasoned strategic suggestion to the managemebt, only to be dismissed.
Then. Consulting company is called in and some kids without knowledge of the industry make sugfestions that are followed and cost vast amounts. But what does not cost anything is not worth
'Nationalising the risk and privatising the reward.' Love this statement!
Also heard privatise the gains, socialise the losses.
Privatised profits, socialised losses. 2008-god knows when it will end.
People in comments pointed out factual errors she made. Meaning either straigh-up lies or serious ignorance.
I would categorize her as a scam-artists pretending to fight scam-artists.
Further issue is (lifeboating)the conflict of interest in the revolving door between mandarins and politicians (local and national) eloping (retiring) to positions with consultancies that they have used in office, which then utilise their connections to further consultancies reach.
Great. What a breath of fresh air!
Brilliant interview.. Cheers
Thanks for this interview!
A consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time. An academic is someone who seeks truth through testing accumulated knowledge. A politician? A power hungry con artist pretending to serve the electorate? The process of consulting is distinctly different from employing a consultant. (Opinion only from someone who previously worked as a consultant.)
@David McCulloch Bang on in your assessment of these 3 professionals!
I cannot say strongly enough how I loathe and detest Conservatives for introducing those parasites into the NHS. Russia isn't the only country to have raving lunatics for leaders.
I don’t think you know much about academia😂
@@celiacresswell6909 just what seven years of experience taught me. Why?
@@davidmcculloch8490 because you said an academic is someone who seeks truth through testing accumulated knowledge. You’re joking right?
The conflict of interest particularly in private firms doing what is best rather than acting in a self serving manner is why all the public sectors seem to be short changing the tax payer on the services they provide. You can see this whenever there is a big publicly funded project and the eye watering costs.
People knock the NHS but it is incredibly underfunded. Easy to look at the metrics of spend per population/GDP for Europe. But some reform is needed for drain on resources to avoid time wasters - 1 pound access fee should do it.
Can the production team work on the quality of the titles of these videos? What she has said in this interview is much more valuable and interesting than just the failure of the Conservative party.
Agree x 100000000. So many video titles fail at this.
Consultants are just there to be kicked out when the job is done. No business/institution should be so dumb to think that outsiders can do it better. The sales manager makes a pitch full of enough buzz words (or lies or whatever) with the help of a senior (not nessesary an expert). Then when they get the contract they staff it with juniors, probably straight from university. For every junior you can basically flip a coin if he is smart enough to fit on the job or at best not stand in the way. The buzzword for this is cost optimization. Not value maximization. But when the project starts nobody wants to back down. So you get something, maybe it fits, maybe it goes directly into trash, maybe it was way more expensive. But to truely rethink you need obvious catastrophic failure, that sadly (luckily?) does not happen often.
Excellent, immediately ordering the book
public and private should be symbiotic not parasitic.
A thought provoking interview - must get the book!
"After being featured in a Financial Times article about how management consultants lack expertise in the areas they advise in, several prominent venture capital investors commented that such an accusation is akin to "the pot calling the kettle black." Although acknowledging that her accusation may be true, Multiple Capital founder Michael Jackson noted that "a person who has innovated nothing, who has never founded a company, who has never built a business, is in no position to advise governments or the European Union on innovation policy."" -well
Getting some intelligent people with consultant skills, an outside perspective, and expertise to help is often helpful. Getting a horde of CHILDREN with zero life or work experience coming in at high cost to improve things ought to be a fireable offense.
I’m not usually a fan of simple solutions that start with “Why don’t we just…”, but often that question is illuminating. So, why don’t we just limit the budget for consultants drastically and then figure out how we used to get by without so many of them.
What a fantastic interview. Fascinating. Thanks again joe.
Fantastic interview
She is a lobbyist!! Reading up about her "institute(lobby group)" and their directors argue the State need to act as venture capital firm and co-invest in things her institute (and the companies who fund it) should be investing in. MO: don't give them money, give me the money
What a fantastic interview,
Enlightening,thanks.
I have not read her book but having watched this interview. I broadly agree with her stance but think that she is less aware of the reality of the entire industry and so I have some comments:
1. There may be a difference between Advisory and Consulting but there are definitely people with expertise/experience of government in these industries. Around 8.14 she conflates two contradictory ideas - a) the consultants don't have expertise and b) the civil servants are not developing the skillsets - someone must be developing these skills and logically it must be the consultants if they are doing the work
2. Civil service pay drives people into consulting/advsiory and outsourcing - there are quite a lot of ex civil service working in these areas, and these companies provide options and therefore bargaining power for civil servants. The government (and voters) shaft civil servants on pay, so it isnt difficult to offer them more money. A manager in the civil service is paid less than the grade below in a second tier consulting company...
3. The structure of the civil service provides little variety and a painful and arcane progression system - just another push factor for talented individuals
4. Outsourcing provides a whipping boy - in the event that something goes wrong you can blame the outsourcing company - if it goes wrong and it was the civil service the media crucifies them
5. This has meant that in some roles the civil service is becoming more and more focused on procurement rather than delivery
6. The covid test and trace system was new and no one had expertise and knowledge of it. Consultants are used all over government and are successful. The government has failed at large projects too - the NHS IT project being a famous example
7. Consultants are not con artists and governments are not stupid - people are making rational decisions based on the choices they face. The structure and pay of the civil service, the cover provided by consultants and the expertise that has fled to consultancies all drive their usage.
Yes we can move away from using consultants but it would require reform of civil service organisation and employment structures and it would require pay increases and a better form of civil service pay bargaining going forwards. I dont see these things happening any time soon.
In community college, one of my instructors hated how the administrators were on a consultant treadmill.
Fantastic interview, so interesting. Maybe get a new Sound recordist !
Politicians aren't the sharpest tools in the box, they like binary choices because its easy: leaves them time to concentrate on career advancement and self enrichment. The media like the over simplification too, that leaves them time to promote an agenda without the distraction of too much real journalism. They've both framed the narrative for so long, it is generally accept to be the truth. Mazzucato looks with a fresh eye, no buying into the BS, suggesting possibilities that aren't framed by outdated doctrine, dogma, and embedded self interest.
The media exists to perpetuate the kind of thinking which the same media will then complain about.
I think that Cybersecurity is an exception. It would take quite a bit of effort to generate the KSE necessary to support a big tech project and consultants are a key part. The bit that people get wrong is the contract. Ethical consultancy always seeks an exit strategy where the supported parties are enabled to take over and run things for themselves. There is a breed of consultant like a tick, that just seeks to burrow in, make themselves indispensable and keep bleeding the company.
The ticks have infested cybersecurity, too.
There’s a phrase at Atkins Global of “Land and expand” I.e. if you get into an organisation you don’t just do the work you have been commissioned to to. You look at other “stuff” to expand the commission and then persuade people they need them more than they do.
Very good interview. Look forward to reading the book. A friend described using consulting companies as 'giving someone your watch and asking them to tell you the time". Perhaps these highly payed people should be able to read their own watch? It is cowardice but it should be called out as incompetence also, and costly at that.
Great show! Go, Joe! 👍 (from Green Fire, UK) 🌈🦉
Interesting how the auto-subtitles can spell names such as Renault but not Keir Starmer or Labour... 🤔
When I was looking for a Job out of Uni I applied to a few consultancy jobs, I even asked what a consultant actually is/does in the interview for one as I literally didn’t know and it didn’t make sense.
There’s a different ‘definition’ for each consultancy branch. Not much research this was just my intuition. I’m not a consultant, didn’t get that job I got the one that was my ‘first choice’ - but it did take a year of job searching 😂
This talk is excellent. Thanks for sharing it with us.
Love listening to her, always learning more,,, many thanks,
The answer to our failure of funding public services is Enthalpy rather than a simple two dimensional ratio of so called 'efficiency' Enthalpy is essentially the necessary energy for a chemical reaction to take pace. It is a waste of money to under-fund.
Says the economist who decries the dominance of markets. But it isn’t markets that imprison us, it is economics, and that is deterministic. Deviation from business as usual, for any goal other than reducing costs or improving efficiency is preempted, and if it gets further, promptly disciplined. Economics is an inescapable doom loop, and we’re in it.
Loved her book - value of everything. Learnt a lot
Amazing interview, very inspiring guest
Your microphones keep clipping in these long-form interviews. Such a shame because it seems to be quite a good and informative interview.
Interesting that Mariana goes for "maximising shareholder value" in one of her first paragraphs; the inventor of the term, Neutron Jack Welsh ("Neutron" as at GE he got rid of all the people but left the buildings standing) apparently made a death-bed confession along the lines of "..when you think about it, maximising shareholder value is a pretty dumb idea". Of course he was retired and had stashed 100s of millions by then.
Incidentally, always interesting how these things come out once the people involved in the policies are no longer in a position to change things! Thatcher's cabinet members Nick Ridley (UK housing shortage) and Nigel "Blubba the Gut" Lawson (UK industrial scale tax-dodging) spring to mind as two examples.....
Missing the big point that "consultants" are not the problem, but the contracts they are offered are. The lack of appropriate SLA's to deliver the outcome the client needs is the issue. The fact this is not policed or held to account is not only the consultants fault.
The simple cause is a client only knows it has a problem if it has the indicators designed to alert it to the problem which trigger actions to control the issue.
Employing consultants can only supply the information requested and hope the client can understand it and act on it. If the client is acting on behalf of a third party such as government, then they need to be aware of the same SLA policing issue.
Ironically life long academics are appointed to be academics by academics, so little new knowledge slips into their mindsets. She sounds well meaning, but would benefit from stepping outside of the "academic shroud" into more selfreflection.
This is a fantastic interview. She's brilliant. Kier Starmer needs to get this woman on board ASAP
So she will be hired as a consultant.
@@roc7880 😂
The concept of socialising the risks goes back to when Alan Greenspan was appointed chairman of the Fed in the 80s. He created the notion of the Fed "Put" where they would always bail out the markets. His first big step was LTCM in 1998. And the Japanese were socialising the risks in the early 90s when bailing out their banks.
The state is a source of money, now that ordinary people have been cleaned out
Grizzly Bear: Thank you, that was a good interview. A simple solution to these problems is to fund the individual rather the industry, and is in it's simplest form Universal Basic Income. UBI has two forms, conditional and unconditional, the unconditional kind leads to a diverse, parabolic economic democracy, the conditional kind leads to a flat, equal economic democracy. They are both forms of voting with money, for essentially the economy is the congress, so a Congressional Crowd Fund, funded by the tax payer, and participated in equally by all citizens, is where politicians should gain their funding. Thinks about that a minute, and then ask these questions again and you'll see alot of the problems evapourate. We need a new form of democacy in this world, and it starts with realising that in a modern economy money is just as relevent a unit of voting as ballots, and I would say is the real unit of democracy, and we are not living in one.
in a word: LOOTING
of the public purse.
Mariana Mazzucato ... I like this lady. She is really sharp.
How is this new concept of 'mission' different from 'aim' or 'objective' or 'target' or 'priority' or 'aspiration' or 'goal'? Surely they all mean the same? And what government does not want to pursue such things regardless of what they call them?
So, how do you select a coalition of the willing, selecting for expertise, when you yourself are not an expert? How do you test for expertise in an arbitrary area? Does it not boil down to prestige? Isn't this an argument to have an in-house expert for partner selection?
Problem:the "best" universities measure their success by how many grads get into constancy and finance.
More from MM please!
Hugely inspiring!
16:00 Make government an investor of first resort instead of ...A lender of Last Resort. Taking risks instead of de-risking others.
Have we simply reached a point where we are losing control over complexity?
MP's & Civil Servants live in fear of projects so 1st job is to abdicate responsibility, 2nd job is reinforce evidence to justify their decisions, 3rd job is a study to provide evidence they selected the right outcome. Lastly they then start looking at the task and how to achieve it .
Being German I admire the UK for having had fought against the Nazis. For me the main reason of the economy in the UK is missing perfect education. We copied the French initiative where any education from kindergarten to the professor at the university is cost free. This includes the spirit to compete and use the intuition for invention with the aid of two scientific institutions, the Max Planck and Fraunhofer Institute. For me this is the tragedy why we see that the best of UK car industry is now in German hands. Once the British started the railway industry. How is it today ? Lastly we have the wrong mentality in the UK, the empire mentality which was the hidden cause of the great Brexit. In history all empires vanished because of their super arrogant mentality. Today the backbone of the UK economy are the Indians. Just think what would happen if all Indians in the UK would leave. So there are many levels which form the UK society and economy and the future does not look as we hope. Will writing books be able to change this tragedy?
Reality is, people in this country never had a voice, the industrial age came and living standards dropped so low people fought for change, late 1800’s men got the right to vote, early 1900’s women got the right. The Industrial Revolution started in Manchester, when all the manufacturing left the country, huge amounts of the economy were lost, because we had no industries, our government turned to privatisation, it brought initial capital back into the country but that wasn’t a sustainable solution to economic stimulus, with even less industry now and no solutions, we’ve voted to leave the EU. A lot of the Brexit vote came from post industrial areas that have never seen development since… our countries still reliant on the interest and infrastructure created from our industrial boom, now we have no industry, no national assets and now disadvantaged trade opportunities, if we start there as a basic understanding about where we’ve come from we can have better conversations about how to get out of it
brilliant !
Excellent