Mariana Mazzucato (previously) came to prominence after the publication of her 2013 book The Entrepreneurial State, which described the way that robust state spending on large-scale R&D was critical to the kinds of commercial technological "breakthroughs" that the private sector liked to take credit for, and argued that the decades-long drawdown in public spending on the theory that governments were bloated and inefficient had stalled economic growth and technological progress because private firms systematically underinvest in research.

From 1961-1963 Richard Feynman — one of the preeminent physicsts of his day — taught an undergraduate class in physics at Cal Tech, a gig that was nominally well below his paygrade, and gave such a virtuoso performance that "They Feynman Lectures" have gone down in the annals of physics history as some of the best introductory material on physics in existence.

Mariana Mazzucato's The Entrepreneurial State uses empirical research to demolish the capitalist orthodoxy that holds the state to be a feckless, harmful distorter of markets.