Modern economies reward activities that extract value rather than create it. This must change to ensure a capitalism that works for us all. A scathing indictment of our current global financial system, The Value of Everything rigorously scrutinizes the way in which economic value has been accounted and reveals how economic theory has failed to clearly delineate the difference between value creation and value extraction. Mariana Mazzucato argues that the increasingly blurry distinction between the two categories has allowed certain actors in the economy to portray themselves as value creators, while in reality they are just moving around existing value or, even worse, destroying it.

The book uses case studies-from Silicon Valley to the financial sector to big pharma-to show how the foggy notions of value create confusion between rents and profits, reward extractors and creators, and distort the measurements of growth and GDP. In the process, innovation suffers and inequality rises. The lesson here is urgent and sobering: to rescue our economy from the next inevitable crisis and to foster long-term economic growth, we will need to rethink capitalism, rethink the role of public policy and the importance of the public sector, and redefine how we measure value in our society.

现代经济奖励那些获取价值而不是创造价值的活动。这一点必须改变，以确保资本主义为我们所有人服务。作为对我们当前全球金融体系的严厉控诉，《万物价值论》严格审视了经济价值的核算方式，揭示了经济理论未能清晰界定价值创造和价值提取之间的区别。Mariana Mazzucato认为，这两个类别之间越来越模糊的区别使得经济中的某些行为者把自己描绘成价值创造者，而实际上，他们只是在围绕现有价值移动，或者更糟糕的是，破坏现有价值。
这本书使用了从硅谷到金融业再到大型制药公司的案例研究，展示了模糊的价值观如何在租金和利润之间造成混淆，奖励提取器和创造者，扭曲了对增长和GDP的衡量。在此过程中，创新受到影响，不平等加剧。这里的教训是紧迫而清醒的：为了使我们的经济摆脱下一次不可避免的危机，并促进长期经济增长，我们需要重新思考资本主义，重新思考公共政策的作用和公共部门的重要性，重新定义我们如何衡量社会中的价值。