A few years ago, some new graffiti appeared somewhere in Hong Kong that read: “We can’t return to normal, because the normal that we had was precisely the problem.” In a sense, Mark Carney has seen the writing on the wall. However, he seems to have trouble seeing the composition of the wall itself, and fully imagining what might be on the other side.
One of his inspirations was a metaphor conveyed to him by Pope Francis, who remarked that humanity is like wine, which has bouquet, colour, richness of taste, and alcohol to enliven the mind. The market, on the other hand, is like grappa, a distilled wine that has only alcohol. The pope’s challenge (and the book’s premise) is to turn grappa back into wine.
Mark Carney offers up the right ideas, but he has not pulled back his focus far enough. He offers few concrete solutions – and certainly nothing that can be done on an individual level, because he has not made some essential connections – namely that values measured by number are unnatural and tend to be doomed from the start.
He does start from the right place. He says what’s important in life is “integrity, fairness, kindness, excellence, sustainability, passion, and reason” – noble thoughts which I support (though perhaps easier to exclude money when you’re part of the nobility class). His very book title is supposed to highlight the inherent theme of the book: “value” (monetary) versus “values” (subjective human concepts), but he does not explore their respective attributes sufficiently.
How does one read the full book review?
Click on the link at the bottom (which has now been addressed correctly). Our apologies.