Ideas lying around - Wealth Tax (including battling Tax Havens), Basic Income,

“The reason progressives often lose the argument,” Mazzucato explains, “is that they focus too much on wealth redistribution and not enough on wealth creation.”

The largest number of these people with self-professed "bullshit jobs" are employed in sectors like finance and marketing.

Every sliver of technology that makes the iPhone a smartphone instead of a stupidphone (internet, GPS, touchscreen, battery, hard drive, voice recognition) was developed by researchers on a government payroll.

And what applies to Apple applies equally to other tech giants. Google? Received a fat government grant to develop a search engine. Tesla? Was scrambling for investors until the US Department of Energy handed over $465m. (Elon Musk has been a grant guzzler from the start, with three of his companies – Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity – having received a combined total of almost $5bn in taxpayer money.)

“The more I looked,” Mazzucato told tech magazine Wired last year, “the more I realised: state investment is everywhere.”

But maybe the example that best makes Mazzucato’s case is the pharmaceutical industry. Almost every medical breakthrough starts in publicly funded laboratories. Pharmaceutical giants like Roche and Pfizer mostly just buy up patents and market old medicines under new brands

If you ask Mazzucato, that needs to change. When government subsidises a major innovation, she says industry is welcome to it. What’s more, that’s the whole idea! But then the government should get its initial outlay back – with interest. It’s maddening that right now the corporations getting the biggest handouts are also the biggest tax evaders. Corporations like Apple, Google, and Pfizer, which have tens of billions tucked away in tax havens around the world.