And this concept of missions that I've been working on for some time, including with the European Commission back in 2018, I wrote a report on mission-oriented policies precisely to make sure the European Union wasn't just washing words like inclusion, sustainability. For me, this is just an example, missions, of how we might start getting closer to actually focusing on outcomes and talking in an explicit way about not the rate of growth but the direction of growth, and having a real conversation about it with all the different stakeholders, and asking how do we also know along the way if we're achieving those missions or if we're just going down these silos because someone's reputation has become associated with whatever that mission might be.
And I think this is incredibly important, these questions that you ask yourselves in NIM and FA, because ultimately we're really stuck. We're stuck as a society. Forget the recent six months, which have become a theatrical conversation in terms of just how many things can go wrong in the geopolitical but also just the political. And anyway, let's not talk about politics right away. We can get to that in the Q&A. But we've been stuck for a long time. We seem to just go from crisis to crisis to crisis, interrelated, right? Poly-crisis, as some people have called them. And my own work has really been saying, you know what, we're stuck because we are just reacting to these crises. We have a very weak ability to foresee, to plan ahead, to work together, to preempt some of these crises.
I mean, the first problem is that the way we have chosen, nothing deterministic, to design our public policies but also the form of our public organizations, at worst is just dismissing government, but that's not really the problem. It's the at best, at best we have decided to think that what government is for and public policy is for is to fix different types of market failures, or if you're smarter, system failures. And even the notion of the public good, which sounds good, one of the words is good, has really been framed in economics as fixing and filling the gap of something the private sector is not doing. So it's in fact not even a theory of the public. It's a theory of the lack of a private thing.
And so because of non-excludable and non-rival characteristics on some goods and services, we expect the government to come in there and invest in that thing. Clean water, defense systems, so on and so forth. Even basic research is justified due to the positive externalities that are created. We don't have enough of private sector investment, so we expect the government to fill that gap. And I've been writing for a long time on why this is problematic. It's problematic because it's obvious to anyone who's not an economist that if you're just constantly fixing something, you will be too little, too late.
In fact, with the NASA project, the moon landing, and the reason I got so interested in it was I noticed that in reading the literature that that's where they began. They said, 'We will never get to the moon. Forget the technology, that's easy. We'll never get to the moon with the current relationships we have between public and private.' So the first thing they did was to actually change how they designed procurement. And my friends always say I'm crazy. They say, 'You get excited by procurement. Like, what's wrong with you?' I actually think procurement is very exciting because it's often 30% of government budgets is just buying stuff, you know, cement to build stuff, desks for schools, hospital beds.
But we use it in a very problematic way, which is not surprising that a lot of corruption, like in Italy, a lot of the corruption has happened through procurement of things like school meals. And so what did they do? They put procurement in an agency against corruption. It sounds good because it's Italian legge anti-mafia, but it's terrible. It basically makes procurement very scared of doing anything because they'll get accused of corruption. We need to fight corruption, but you don't then shackle procurement.
And what the head of NASA procurement, his name was Ernest Brackett, did, he said, 'Get rid of this boring procurement, which was cost-plus procurement, just looking for the lowest cost, and let's have challenge-oriented, fixed-price procurement with incentives for quality and innovation.' And in fact, it was that kind of design of an outcomes-oriented problem, right? Because the problem was getting to the moon and back in a short amount of time, but there were thousands of other problems. What would the astronauts wear? What would they eat? How would they go to the bathroom?
So it was by using outcomes-oriented procurement that then the government worked with the private sector. 400,000 people worked together to get us to the moon with the private sector to stimulate bottom-up, I repeat, bottom-up innovation across many different sectors: nutrition, materials, electronics, and so on. Of course, aerospace. You know, missions only work if they're interesting. Like, if you can't even remember what the hell was that mission, it's probably not going to inspire very much. Remember when all the kids were looking up and all the people looking up at space, and then somehow it stimulated children to go study STEM subjects or students? It made it sexy again.
So, you know, it's really important at the ground level, at the city level, to have a dialogue with people. What are the missions that would most stimulate a society? Sometimes this can be more top-down setting of the mission and bottom-up accomplishment. But the most interesting missions I've personally worked on have been actually at the city level where the missions themselves are co-designed with people. So in Camden, my part of London, I worked with Georgia Gould, who now is actually a minister in the new government, but we worked on the housing estate, so social housing, and we thought of different missions around clean growth and brought the resident associations, the citizen assemblies to the table, but also transformed the food banks into food cooperatives, green food cooperatives.
And I can tell you the dignity, the value that people feel when they own a bit of the project. So in a cooperative, literally the facial expression of the person walking into a food bank is completely different from their expression walking into a food cooperative where they are part of the agenda. That's something I increasingly care about. I don't think economists are very good at understanding it. We should listen much more to anthropologists, psychologists, whereas, Teimmo, you're a psychologist, in terms of what you know, empathy, listening matters if you're going to do this properly.
But anyway, missions, in order not to have mission washing, they should be bold and inspirational with a clear direction, ambitious while realistic, but especially these last two bits here: catalyzing cross-sectoral innovation and investment in academia. Let's bring in also not just the STEM subjects, as I said, the poets, the humanities, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, 'dreaming of the big blue sea.' We need the artists, the designers, as Roosevelt did. Remember Roosevelt after the great crash, he brought the architects, the designers, the artists as part of the WPA. It's very smart to reimagine where do we even want to go? What kind of society?
It's interesting. They had the national park. The national parks were built out of that depression. And that was reimagining space, public space. It's not just technology and cement and building infrastructure. And this last point is critical. If it doesn't drive multiple bottom-up solutions, it's not going to actually drive growth. And without growth, we don't have jobs and so on. But it's not growth for growth's sake. It's directed growth solving problems.
And by the way, one of the guys who died, burnt to death in the Apollo 1 fire, Gus Grissom, before dying, burnt alive in the lunar module, said, 'How the hell are we going to get to the moon if we can't even talk between two or three buildings?' because they couldn't hear what was being said in the mission control room. And on the back of that, NASA changed its bureaucracy. DARPA, which was set up in the same year in 1954, changed its bureaucracy to be more about horizontal communication between departments. Right? Each project department project manager with their delegated team in constant communication one with another.
So these organizational behavior changes, decision sciences issues are not a thing in and of itself. It matters if you have a problem to solve. So there's no point in telling a government, 'Oh, don't be boring, be flexible, be agile, invest in capabilities' if the theory of government is just to fix market failures. It's fine to be boring. If instead you're going to shape markets, if you're going to work with the private sector to become more prepared for the next pandemic, if you're going to fight those battles around biodiversity, water, climate, and equality, you better be not only capable, agile, flexible, but working together horizontally between government departments.
