Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. This is the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas and their lives and the events that have helped shape them.

My guest this week is Professor of Economics at University College London.

Marianna Massacato is a thinker, an academic, she's the author of many books, she's an advisor to many governments.

Her latest work, which she's done with one of her students Rosie Collington, is called The Big Con.

How the consulting industry weakens our businesses and fanatelises our governments and warps our economies.

And this is very timely, as we look to a period sort of building up to an election, Labour is talking about new ideas for governments.

But first of all, what are consultants? Who are consultants? What do they do?

I mean, maybe if I can just step back two seconds, the reason it matters to ask a question you've just asked is who are the actors in the economy and within that who are the consultants?

Sometimes forget there's lots of different types of actors, there's public actors, private actors.

There's all sorts of intermediaries, including increasingly philanthropies in the space of health, for example, the Gates Foundation, and there's these consultants.

And any challenge we have, whether it's climate change or health, requires lots of different types of actors to collaborate, to really foster collective intelligence between them.

And consultants, I would say, are some of the least known, these are advisers, companies that actually, there's an industry called the consulting industry.

The famous names might be McKinsey, KPMG, PWC, Deloitte.

And what we look at is that the answer of who are they has actually changed over time.

They used to be on the sidelines, literally advising, consulting, in the same way that you might imagine a head teacher might even be consulting, a nurse could be consulting.

But first of all, it's on the side of what they do, and they're bringing in their expertise to the area.

And what we look at is how this consulting industry has changed over time from being on the sidelines, advising literally on the side to actually doing, being at the center.

And we look at what has actually happened, then, to the different actors that they are consulting and advising along the way.

I mean, underlying all of this, I suppose, is decades now of belief that the public sector government just isn't very good at delivering things.

And I suppose that, you know, that dates back to the 70s in this country, and British Leyland and British Rail, and the idea of a country that was broken because the government was trying to run everything.

I mean, why are we still hobbled by this idea that the government can't do anything, but the private sector, which keeps making mistakes, can.

Well, first of all, the private sector, when it does make mistakes, what's interesting is sometimes it even brags about those mistakes.

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