The wrong question is: how much money is there and what can we do with it? The right question is: what needs doing and how can we structure budgets to meet those goals?

Government thus cannot limit itself to reactively fixing markets, but must explicitly co-shape markets to deliver the outcomes society needs. It can and should guide the direction of the economy, serve as an ‘investor of first resort’ and take risks. It can and should shape markets to fulfil a purpose.

The key is to specify what is needed without micromanaging the way in which it is done – so to stimulate as much creativity and innovation in multiple actors.

The ambition of government should be to set off catalytic reactions across society, an important part of which would be performing as a better partner to business – helping steer change towards meeting society’s challenges, offering clear rewards for businesses willing to help ‘make it happen’ and stumping up the high-risk early investments that

This book’s thesis is that we cannot move on from the key problems facing our economies until we abandon this narrow view. Mission thinking of the kind I outline here can help us restructure contemporary capitalism.

the public sector is likely to be less efficient. And there is the idea – which will be a major theme of this book – that government should limit itself to technical efforts to counter market failure and enhance public-sector efficiency by introducing market discipline.15

Economic theories of contract and property rights are clear that the more complicated a product is, the greater the likelihood of asymmetries of information, whereby the seller – say a private provider of prison services – has more information than the buyer, the government.

the goal should be broad enough to encompass numerous projects that together achieve the overall mission. Some of these projects will fail; others will succeed. But the ambition is to stimulate as many different ideas and routes to solutions as possible.

This means putting less emphasis on the need to support specific types of firms (such as SMEs and start-ups), less on specific technologies (such as ‘high-tech’, artificial intelligence, quantum computing), and less on specific sectors to promote (such as life sciences or the creative sector). At the same time, it means putting more emphasis on the