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What Comes After The Neoclassical Theory Of Value?

In seeking to understand and redress the conditions that have led “a tiny elite” to capture “nearly all the gains from an expanding economy” over the past four decades, Mariana Mazzucato’s The Value of Everything joins a large and growing body of scholarship on the sources of economic inequality. Unlike much of this work, however, Mazzucato does not orient her story around a cabal of neoliberal elites, or the structural conditions of post-Fordism, or the income effects of automation or globalization. Rather she wants to draw attention to “the stories we are being told about who the wealth creators are” (XIII)—stories rooted in the circuitous intellectual history of value. According to Mazzucato, this deep history has quietly shaped the moral logic and established practices of our governing institutions, and those who seek to “change this state of things” (XVIII) need to begin by reopening long-dormant questions about how value should be defined and measured. In service of this goal, the first three chapters provide an engaging and broadly accessible survey of past definitions of “value” and the metrics used to track it over time. Mazzucato traverses Sir William Petty’s and Gerald King’s pioneering attempts at national accounting, the physiocrats’ emphasis on the primacy of the land, Ricardo’s and Marx’s elaborations on the labor theory of value, and finally the marginalists’ turn toward subjective preferences as measured by prices. Overall, however, Mazzucato emphasizes a transition from the “objective” criteria of value perceived by most theorists prior to the marginalist revolution, to the “subjective” criteria that became widespread thereafter. Even if the search for intrinsic sources of value yielded variable and contingent results, Mazzucato laments the incapacity of the marginalists to establish criteria beyond the price mechanism for determining whether an action creates or destroys value. Instead, for over a century the regnant neoclassical theory of value has led policymakers to believe that “income from rent must be productive,” and that “unearned income” [74; emphasis Mazzucato’s] is a contradiction in terms. She argues that this “reasoning is circular,