How could any government afford that? Here’s the thing: it wasn’t about the cost – it was about the mission itself.
It took seven years, cost $28 billion – about $283 billion in 2020 terms – and it involved north of 400,000 people.
“The most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.” That’s how President Kennedy described the moon mission in 1962. The key message here is: We need to transform our political economy with an approach as visionary as the 1960s moon mission. And what better inspiration than the iconic mission that culminated more than 50 years ago, with one small step? This was surprising: even governments usually fond of economic austerity injected billions and billions into supporting healthcare and the economy.īut what sort of system were they propping up? The sad truth is, the political economy was suffering from plenty of deep, structural problems even before the coronavirus came along.įixing those problems requires some seriously big-picture thinking, with a mighty sense of purpose – or, as the author Mariana Mazzucato puts it, a sense of mission. Faced with disaster, many governments approached the crisis with a method best summed up by three words: whatever it takes. In 2020, the world plunged into the Covid-19 crisis.
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