Who really creates wealth in our world? And how do we decide what the value of what is created is? At the center of today’s financial and economic crisis, this is an apparent problem.

In modern capitalism, value extraction is more rewarded than value creation: the productive process that constitutes the driving force of a healthy economy and society. From companies that are exclusively driven by the incentive to maximize shareholder value to the astronomically high prices of drugs justified through "value pricing" by the enormous pharmaceutical industry, we often mistakenly perceive extraction as creation and have lost the meaning of value.

The concept of value - what it is, why it matters to us - which once formed a basic principle of economic thought, is no longer discussed. However, as Mariana Mazzucato argues in this insightful and passionately written book, if we want to reform capitalism - to radically transform an increasingly sick system rather than continue to feed it - we urgently need to rethink where wealth comes from.

What activities create it, what extracts it, what destroys it? The answers to these questions are fundamental if we want to replace the current parasitic system with a type of capitalism that is more sustainable, more compatible - that works for us.

The Value of Everything will reignite a dialogue that has long needed to start regarding the kind of world we want to live in.