"This book’s big point is that it is far too easy for those operating in the market economy to get rich by extracting economic value from those who add it, not by adding it themselves. [...] It is not just finance that is in the dock. Mazzucato also attacks what is going on in more obviously beneficial sectors of the economy, such as information technology and pharmaceuticals. [...] A fundamental thesis of the book is that mistaking value extraction for value creation, and vice versa, has its roots in the errors of economists. [...] the book has three significant strengths. First, Mazzucato pushes us to get away from the simplistic creed that markets are always good and governments always bad. Second, she offers the Left a positive goal of prosperity-inducing innovation rather than a sterile and ultimately destructive politics of resentment and redistribution. Finally, she forces us to ask ourselves what adds value to society and how to create an economic and social order that promotes that. The book itself adds value by forcing us to confront these points."

"Her central thesis is that many people have become rich over recent decades not by creating value but by extracting it – financiers and internet entrepreneurs, among others. We have failed to see this because we are wedded to the false idea that “price determines value”. More specifically, we are fixated on the “marginalist” theory developed in the late 19th century by economists such as Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall [...] Mazzucato’s failure to refute marginalism, or to offer any coherent theory of value of her own, undermines her subsequent claims about who is making and who is taking, who is a producer and who a mere rentier. These assertions are entailed by no theory of value; they are the personal judgements of Mazzucato about who is deserving and who not."

"Predictions of the end of capitalism are as old as capitalism and Mazzucato does not write as its enemy. On the contrary, she is the sort of critical friend it needs and she is nothing like as radical as her political adoption would suggest. [...] Her solutions are part-voluntary and part-coercive. Companies should behave better but the incentives — in executive pay, taxation and regulation — all point in the wrong direction. Government, she says, ought to be less craven in the face of the financial and the tech giants. Generally, though, this is a book longer on analysis and diagnosis than on solutions."