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). 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. 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.

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.” What are central banks doing? “Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), a coalition of seventy central banks, representing countries that generate almost three-quarters of the world’s emissions, have developed representative scenarios to show how climate risks might evolve and affect the real and financial economies.” They’re modeling. There are two chapters on COVID19 as well the financial crisis, and two on climate change as well as the gold standard. Carney likes to think (or perhaps hopes) he has not lost the common touch, talking to shop owners and students as well as heads of state and other central bankers. The book ends with a chapter on humility. He says “A sense of self must be accompanied by s sense of solidarity.” We have moved from a market economy to a market society, and this is now undermining our basic social contract of relative equality of outcomes, equality of opportunity and fairness across generations.” I appreciate his thesis and the work he's put into realizing it, despite his blinkers on some core issues, and I'm glad he's working for the UN on the climate transition because I think he'll do a lot of good there. I'm glad I read the book although I already have blanked out anything to do with financial systems. Those who are interested in the ideas presented and would like to skip the money talk might better served by listening to his BBC Reith Lectures, which I heard on CBC Ideas: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/...Despite knowing and working with the who’s who of finance, Carney is not about to criticize anyone else. Even for Alan Greenspan, whose hands-off administration led The Great Moderation of supposedly endless stability to the great financial crisis of 2008 (which for some has still not ended), Carney has no critique. The farthest he goes is to quote Greenspan himself at a congressional hearing where he admitted to being “partially wrong” after seeing the incredible greed of Wall Street in action. Otherwise, everything’s good.

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. I was rather hoping Value(s) would be a seat at the central bankers’ table. It is everything but. And flat to boot. 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." This assault on the modern free market is a landmark achievement. It will help arm the best in business, finance and government and disarm the worst.' - Will Hutton, The Observer 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.These fundamental problems and others like them, argues Mark Carney, stem from a common crisis in values.

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. About the human resource, how do you value life? It should be greater than the investment they represent: the sum total of their skills, aptitudes and commercial value.

This is the kind of insight I wanted to read more of, but what I have referenced here is pretty much all there is in the book. He comes over as a learned historian with a good education in the classics. Above all, one gets a sense of the author’s humanity. This book is also an economic treatise on the economic ills of the world and what do about it. We are in the middle of a new industrial revolution with the influence of a pandemic adding to the equation. 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. 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.