Mark Carney argues that treating price as a proxy for value has driven crises in finance, health and climate. His book offers a roadmap for rebuilding trust, fairness and resilience.

Mark Carney has received international acclaim for his speech calling out the rupture of the rules-based international order. But we shouldn’t have been surprised. In this outstanding book, _Values: An economist's guide to everything that matters_, Carney demonstrates how the marketisation of our values has provoked major crises, and he then provides a road map to a fairer, more responsible and resilient world.

Mark Carney is uniquely experienced. First, he was the Governor of two central banks – the Bank of Canada (2008 to 2013) and then the Bank of England (2013 to 2020). Carney was the first foreigner to hold this position, demonstrating the high regard in which Carney was held. After the Bank of England Governorship, Carney was the UN Special Envoy for Climate Change and Finance, along with some other Board appointments. It was during that period with the UN that Carney in 2021 wrote this book.

Since then, in March 2025, Carney became Prime Minister of Canada and after winning the subsequent election he has continued in that position.

As far as I know Carney is the first and only senior public servant to ever become Prime Minister of his country. But in addition, Carney has written an extraordinarily erudite book about values. Something that none of his contemporaries in government could ever have achieved. And it is a great shame that Carney’s book has not achieved wider circulation and received more attention in Australia.

What are our values

In many respects our values are what define us, both as individuals and as a society. For Carney our values are central to determining the future of our society, our economy and the planet.

The first part of Carney’s book is therefore a discussion of what are values our and why they matter.

Critical to Carney’s analysis is the distinction between value as measured by the price of something and values. Or as Oscar Wilde famously put it, “he knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”.

As Carney says: “Values and value are related but distinct”. Values represent the standards of behaviour that we expect, such as integrity, fairness, kindness, excellence, sustainability, passion and reason. “Value is the regard that something is held to deserve – its importance, worth or usefulness”. But the economic value of a good or service is generally relative – how much will be given up in exchange for it, and that depends upon circumstances.

In Part 1 of his book Carney provides a most erudite history of the concept of economic value and how that has evolved over time, eventually giving rise to today’s marketised society.

This discussion starts with Aristotle, followed by analysis of values in the Middle Ages and the Reformation before turning to discuss the intellectual giants of the Industrial Revolution – Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx – who focused on the value of the factors of production, and especially labour. Subsequently in the 1870s a new school of thought – the neo-classicists – explained the value of a product through differences in the utility to the consumer. Finally, this discussion concludes with Alfred Marshall, who at the beginning of the last century brought it all together explaining value in terms of the interaction of both supply and........

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