It’s one of the central economic questions of our time: what is value and who creates it? The economist Mariana Mazzucato has tried to answer it in her new book The Value of Everything – arguing that it’s time to refocus. She claims that right now – many of the world’s most successful companies don’t actually create anything but merely “extract value” – and in the process, get rewarded more highly. Describing the current system as “parasitic” she says we need to change course toward a more “sustainable, more symbiotic” model.