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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.
He keeps to that theme pretty much throughout, but it becomes endlessly repetitive once you understand how he thinks. He thinks like a bureaucrat.
What exactly is on the mind of the Davos-going Laurentian elite these days? Let Mark Carney, the former Governor of both the Banks of England and Canada and the current UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, tell you what the global good want to do. In his view, “the values of the market are usurping those of humanity, sustainability, resilience, solidarity and responsibility.” This book, written for the United Nations COP 26 summit on climate change, looks at the financial crisis of 2008, the Covid 19 pandemic, and the climate crisis: how they came about, what weaknesses of governance and finance they revealed, and how we can fix the problems that ail us. If we are all humble, we can recognise that answers can be found through processes that will bring them out through debate, considering different perspectives and forging consensus.” A fantastic read for anyone interested in the most pressing issues facing us. The need for a world of profit with better purpose is explained in such a clear and persuasive style. I hope it gets read by many people ' -Jim O'NeillI
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. 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.” 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.
The reason I brought this book was the author, the handful of books I have read on economics are largely written by academics and journalists, who are merely observers. Mark Carney in his role as Governor of the Bank of Canada, and more recently the Bank of England, has lived and influenced our current financial system and has had a fount row seat for significant events, such as the financial crisis and Brexit. I have no doubt Mr. Carney will lose some readers in the first few chapters, which are abstract and - quite honestly - a bit dull.
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