Value(s): The must-read book on how to fix our politics, economics and values

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It is refreshing to find a top economist and businessman of such pedigree with both political savvy and social conscience - someone prepared to look to a future rather than looking for personal gain in the short term without regard to a future world and its survival. At present, in most countries it is more attractive to invest in machines and software than it is to invest in people.” “We should not view technology through the lens of Big Tech, where the role of algorithms is to replace humans, and interactions are organised to feed business models centred on big data.” Overall, the book has a lot to say on the three Cs: Climate Change, Credit and COVID-19. When discussing the three topics in tandem, it is undoubtedly at its most compelling for the casual reader. The author’s final chapter is devoted to humility. That might sound an oxymoronic term when talking about Government or Big Business. However, Carney sees humility as the desirable and appropriate attitude to leading and governing.

The penultimate chapter preceding the aforementioned one is supposedly about Canada ("How Canada Can Build Value for All"), but strangely Canada itself is not mentioned all that much in the chapter. There are some passing references to Canadian society present as well as a couple Canadian social policies used as examples to tie into the concepts being discussed, but those are few and far between. It was almost as if the author decided near the end of the book's editing process that he wanted to connect the book a little more to his home and native land, so he arbitrarily chose that chapter in particular to park some Canadian references in. Value(s) has two chapters on climate change, but neither one contains any thoughts on how to tame it. Instead, they are about bureaucratic process and ESG, the new rating system for companies to rate themselves on environmental, social and governance issues like diversity.But Carney is not deterred. In his love of lists and process, he says: “There are a variety of ways to calculate the warming impact across equities, corporate bonds and sovereign bonds and then to combine them into a single ‘portfolio’ score. They have three steps in common: He then explores the earliest, objective, theories of value. Typically, whether espoused by Aristotle or the canonists, these saw justice, value, and market price as separate but interconnected concepts. This meant that the price of goods should take account of both the objective value it holds by virtue of its production, and underlying concepts of justice (which in turn influences value). This means that it is "critical to recognise the extent to which their value theories and economics were unified aspects of a much larger world (indeed heavenly) view." 16th to 18th century thinkers built on this foundation as they increasingly saw the economy as a system, but also began to take a more secularised and pragmatic view of economics. Initially, in a predominately agricultural society, value was tied to the land. Later, following the industrial revolution, thinkers like Karl Marx and Adam Smith articulated value in terms of labour. Regardless, value was seen as an objective measure connected to the production of something and separate to the price set on an it by the market. A radical book that speaks out accessibly as to how we get everyone involved in solving our problems. And this is what we need: 50 Shades of People for 50 Shades of Green' - Bono In Value(s), Mark Carney offers a vision of a more humane society and a practical manifesto for getting there. How we reform our infrastructure to make things better and fairer is at the heart of every chapter, with outlines of wholly new ideas that can restructure society and enshrine our human values at the core of all that we build for our children and grandchildren. Along the same lines: “We have learned that talking about ‘prices and jobs’ is far more effective than the economic jargon of inflation and employment.” Central bankers recognize their audience. It just means banks will continue to be bailed out, currencies will continue to be manipulated, and debt will continue to rise. Because that’s how they build confidence in money.

But the sweep and aim of Value(s) remains magnificent. It will help arm the best in business, finance and government and disarm the worst. The progressive cause has been advanced. The boy from Canada’s Northwest Territories, still slightly incredulous at his own phenomenal career given his modest beginnings, done good. To Schelling, the intangible qualities associated with life were not that different form other consumer goods. We put a value on pain when, through the market, we set a price for Ibuprofen and a value on pleasure when we set a price for Pepsi. ... Schelling argued that what mattered was that these judgements on the value of intangibles were made by the general population and not by economists. What is value? How is it grounded? What values underpin value? Can the very act of valuation shape our values and constrain our choices? How do the valuations of markets affect the values of our society? Does the narrowness of our vision, the poverty of our perspective, mean we undervalue what matters to our collective wellbeing? These questions, which vexed Carney during his time as the governor of the Bank of England, are those that he sets out to explore in this stimulating book. He believes, rightly, that values, beliefs and culture are indispensable to a vibrant economy. These values include such characteristics as responsibility, fairness, integrity, dynamism, solidarity and resilience; and part of our collective responsibility is to reinforce and pass them on. Where this book shines is when it is illuminating the flaws in our financial system, particularly those related to climate change and COVID 19 related inequalities, and in highlighting the need for urgent action. We also get, if you have the patience, a very informed and in depth explanation of why the 2008 financial crises happened. The basic principle is that value, ie. a dollar, pound or euro amount, is being confused and confounded with values, which are societal, and not monetary. He summarizes it this way: “In recent decades, subtly but relentlessly, we have been moving from a market economy to a market society. Increasingly, to be valued, an asset or activity has to be in a market; the price of everything is becoming the value of everything.”By far the most negative and critical chapter in the book is about cryptocurrencies. These are apparently evil incarnate. Carney basically has nothing good to say about them. They are not authorized, not regulated, not bound by nations, central banks or governments. They offer no guarantees, no oversight and no submission to rules other than their own. They don’t scale and aren’t universally available. They will never replace currencies, which do offer all of the above, and anyway, today’s currencies are more and more global and digital every day, so cryptocurrencies offer little or nothing over central bank-issued real money. A crypto coin from a central bank offers nothing for Mark Carney. In his own words: Unfortunately, the book is let down by the author; it is overly long and in places very dry, it's also quite jarringly self-aggrandizing (despite preaching the importance of humility on a number of occasions). The organization of this book was also effective. The three sections, which easily could have each comprised their own book, woven together through the central theme of value. This provided the scope to discuss the history of money and couch the discussion without the broader social and philosophical context of how our society thinks about value before delving in the to the heart of the subject matter. Finally, leading into a more robust discussion on the vision Carney has for how to ameliorate these existing problems within this broader social context. This allowed for fun tendrils throughout linking the the different sections through unexpected and insightful connections. Readers might think Carney is therefore not sold on market economies, but he totally is. Despite their unending attempts to monetize values, their continual skirting of regulations to produce the next banking crisis, and the endless greed they routinely qualify as virtue, Carney understands their power to build, innovate, and of course, fund. This, like everything in the book, is not in the least controversial. Carney is forgiving of pretty much everything. Banking, finance and economics are continually evolving. What was true when we were on the gold standard is not true today. Rules made yesterday will need revising tomorrow. All the errors are forgivable.

Carney seems to understand the universal attributes of leadership: purpose, perspective, clarity, competence, and humility. It’s certainly refreshing to review what makes a leader and perhaps we should ask this of our own heads of government in whichever country we live. He sees crisis occurring throughout history as an opportunity to question how and what we value, and that should change strategies that dictate how we deal with the future. Our world is full of fault lines - growing inequality in income and opportunity; systemic racism; health and economic crises from a global pandemic; mistrust of experts; the existential threat of climate change; deep threats to employment in a digital economy with robotics on the rise. Carney talks about the meaning of Value from different perspectives throughout history and of how that can be measured: the connection, for example, between value and price. Sounds almost like Oscar Wilde. The subject matter could be purely theoretical discourse and the epitome of dryness. However, the author tells a story and peppers it with personal anecdotes drawn from his life and of the many people he has met in his work. One gets the impression that Carney is not wishing to perpetuate the usual stories just because they are convenient. His most memorable thoughts on climate are two small anecdotes. Carney says he received Greta Thunberg one day at the Bank of England. He took her downstairs to show her the hundreds of millions of pounds worth of gold stored there. That she was unimpressed would be a good British understatement. Carney simply says Thunberg has a way of keeping you focused on her issue. A bold and urgent argument by economist and former bank governor Mark Carney on the radical, foundational change that is required if we are to build an economy and society based not on market values but on human values.I digress. Its not a bad chapter by any means, but, like some other stretches of this book, seems like it could have used a strong editor to give it cohesion. First, unlike most consumer goods, life is what some economists term a non-positional good. That means that no part of a life's value stems form the ownership of comparable goods by others. We do not feel any better off when those around us have less life [ed. I can think of a few exceptions], though we may feel better off when we have a nicer car. In contrast, drawing on a host of evidence form behavioural trials, Robert Frank posits that the value of many consumption goods is partly based on how they affect the person's actual or perceived position. ... Evidence shows that workplace safety and risk of death are valued in absolute terms. People will support measures that increase their life expectancy even if it increases the life expectancy of others by more. Frank concludes that life is the one unequivocal non-positional good. Central banker Mark Carney has diagnosed a crisis in value(s). He doesn’t just mean prices being misaligned with values as in frothy asset overvaluations. That’s just a symptom of a deeper malaise. The central idea of his book, says the Toronto Star’s Heather Scoffield, is that “… the world has devolved into a harsh, crisis-prone place by putting a monetary value or price on pretty much everything, and that erodes the societal values that hold the world together.” The first section of the book opens with some definitions. Values represent "principles or standards of behaviour; they are judgements of what is important in life," whereas value "is the regard that something is held to deserve - the importance, worth or usefulness of something." Increasingly, the value of an act, object, even person, is equated to its monetary value as determined by the market. At its most extreme this means that everything can be commoditised, with unavoidable consequences on societies values. As he comments, "when everything is relative, nothing is immutable."

Carney does rely on his readers understanding a vast range of specialized finance words and acronyms that were entirely beyond me, and yes, I could have googled them, but I wouldn't have retained the information nor clearly understood how it all fit together without taking a simultaneous Econ 101 course at the very least. When he dropped the finance lingo and spoke to the book's central thesis directly--that we need a financial system that marries value (price, cost, profit) with values (social and ecological)--his writing was lucid and compelling and often very funny. I greatly enjoyed those parts and they were well worth wading through the rest for me. One might have expected this book, written by someone who has been Governors of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England to be a dry, almost incomprehensible tome likely to propagate a much desired snooze at any time of day or night. To the contrary, it is very readable, lively and with a poetic use of language. However, there’s still much that I didn’t understand concerning the history, and stories of the many financial crises that in recent times have peppered our financial lives. So this book is not an easy read. Hope is not a strategy and to quote Tim Geithner’s refrain plan beats no plan. And a plan that is actually executed is the best one of all. Searching endlessly for the best is the enemy of the good.Mr. Carney is clearly a smart, articulate guy. He relies a little too much on bullet-points and numbered lists for my personal taste, but this book is nonetheless both well-written and well-researched. In fact, I jotted down some interesting books and articles that are referenced in the endnotes section for my own interest.