Mark Carney: Value(s)—Building a Better World for All Public Affairs, Hatchett Book Group, 2021

Mark Carney, the former governor of both the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada, is one of this era’s most respected central bankers and public servants. We are accustomed to figures of Carney’s accomplishment and renown writing memoires of their time in powerful positions. Instead, Mark Carney has written a book that is wide-aperture, forward-looking, and ambitious for the world. His writing is partly diagnostic and partly prescriptive—with quite pragmatic and granular recommendations—while drawing on his Bank of England experience to support his arguments with concrete examples.

The central theme of the book, as indicated by its title, is the dual meaning of the word value and the world’s need to find a way forward that reconciles the values of society and value as priced by markets. He contrasts subjective value (what society wants that cannot easily be reduced to a number) and objective value (as evidenced by quantification, monetization, and in recent decades ‘derivatization’). He expounds on the tension between moral sentiments and market sentiment. This book is not narrowly about central banking, nor is it, strictly speaking, an economic treatise. The book puts forward Mark Carney’s accumulated wisdom from a career in both the private sector and public sector as a finance practitioner and an economic policy maker. It also presents his well-reasoned and well-supported views about how to confront the challenges the world faces, especially climate change.

Carney is not a markets absolutist, and that comes through clearly. His experience has convinced him of the limitations of the market as the organizing principle for a successful society. He argues for action that narrows the gap between society’s values and market-priced value and ensures that values drive value.

He focuses on three recent and current crises—the global financial crisis of 2008, COVID-19, and climate change—and presents these as fundamentally crises of value. In making this crises-of-value case, Carney highlights two unfortunate human and social syndromes that underlie the values-value tension. These are the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and the ‘tragedy of the horizon,’ in simple terms narrow self-interest combined with short-term perspective. As an antidote, he offers seven social/moral values on which to base efforts to align social value and market value. These are dynamism, resilience, sustainability, fairness, responsibility, solidarity, and humility. This, then, is the framework he applies to the challenge of climate change and other contemporary problems.

Mark Carney is currently serving as the UN special envoy on climate action and finance. So, he has deep expertise on how the goal of a sustainable environment and financial markets ought to intersect. He centers this discussion around the ‘net-zero’ emissions objective and the imperative of company-level transition plans—plans that are meticulously assessed by the financial community in valuing enterprises. He also makes an effective defense, in my opinion, of the movement to incorporate climate risk into central banks’ vigilance and oversight.

It is obvious that Carney is passionate and insightful about what needs to happen to address climate change, but he also addresses ESG investing more broadly as well as crypto currencies/central bank digital currencies, financial system stability, and values-based leadership, especially in the private sector.1 The breadth of his knowledge, experience, and inquisitiveness shows through. The scope of his commentary fusing normative judgment with pragmatic good sense is impressive.

My criticisms are minor, even petty. The book has some of the vices of its virtues. The book’s comprehensive scope and richness of detail may leave the reader with a feeling that Carney has tried to do too much. He makes so many profound points in the book that I found myself hoping for more stories from his time at the Bank of England or elsewhere. At the same time, a careful reader may find the book repetitive in places. All that said, it is an enormously important and successful book.

This book deserves to be widely read. It is aimed, in my opinion, at a global audience of business leaders, policy thinkers, and public servants, and especially at those who work at the intersection of private business and public policy. It is well organized, coherent in structure and argument, and comprehensive. It is an important and serious book and should have major impact.

Value(s)—Building a Better World for All is the (a) magnum opus of a serious and experienced man who cares deeply about the world. I hope this is not the last we hear from Mark Carney.