The Big Con (Mazzucato and Collington book)

The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies is a 2023 nonfiction book by economists Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington. It argues that the overreliance on consultancies erodes government capabilities, and that consultancies perform a "confidence trick", overselling their value to potential clients in the absence of specific expertise.

The book proposes three solutions: require consultancies to declare conflicts of interest, rebuild public sector capabilities to become less dependent on consultancies and improve how the outcomes of contracts are evaluated. The Big Con received generally positive reviews, but some reviewers were critical of the unclear definition of value and the scarcity of evidence from outside the English-speaking world.