(I wrote a whole review before this but accidentally deleted it so here’s my half-assed second attempt)

Value(s) is a book by the current (as of Aug 2025) prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney. This book acts a manifesto for Carney’s ideal economic policy and more generally society as a whole. The central thesis is that market fundamentalism is detrimental to society and that economic policy should be grounded in common shared values such as humility, fairness, and dynamism (to name a few).

Brief summary

The book is split into three parts. The first covers the history of value, starting from Adam Smith’s theory of objective value and covering prevailing ideas in chronological order including (but not limited to) Marx’s labor theory of value, and utilitarian schools of thought. Then the history of currency is summarized, going over the transition from the gold standard and detailing the intrinsic value behind modern currencies. This part culminates in Carney’s statement of his thesis which simply put argues that market fundamentalism erodes social values and leaves everyone in society worse off. His solution is to employ government intervention in key areas, steering markets towards more values focused initiatives and straying from simply optimizing profits or shareholder value.

The second part covers three recent/relevant economic crises, the 2008 recession, COVID, and the ongoing climate crisis. He uses these three as case studies of where previous approaches to economic policy went wrong and how we can prevent them from occurring in the future. Carney argues that in the case of 2008, this was caused by a lack of values. He then makes the case that the COVID crisis was also caused by a lack of values (particularly the value of resilience). With both of these situations he details how specific values could have prevented both and how by reinforcing these values they can be avoided and fixed. The climate crisis, as it is still ongoing, is approached in a cautionary fashion. Carney pretty much says we need a values-based approach to solving this issue and while he details how many of our current approaches are following this mantra, we still have more work to do.

The final part covers how we can build a more robust values-based society. Here he identifies how leaders, companies, and citizens can make a change towards this society through: values-based leadership, stakeholder capitalism over shareholder primacy, impact investing, etc.

My thoughts

This book had a lot of new information that I had not previously known about or at least only heard in passing. It allowed me to get a better handle on what the WEF conspiracy theorists are so up in arms about which is literally just Keynesian, technocratic, and progressive economic policy. I was surprised by how unradical the ideas were in this book, they’re mostly stuff that I expected and for the most part each idea was well-argued.

I particularly enjoyed the first part as I learned a lot about economic history (a subject I want to learn more about) and had some questions answered such as “if there’s no gold standard what gives modern money its value?”.

I think the biggest weakness of this book is its bloated nature, not just in length but also in the sterile, academic/bureaucratic (not sure exactly how to describe it) language littered with acronyms (I gave up keeping up with the 12983712 acronyms referred to through the book very quickly) used throughout. It made the text fairly inaccessible at points, particularly when Carney would reference terms or jargon exclusive to economists. I believe it would not pose a problem to more committed reader but for someone who was maybe 60% excited to read this, it really discouraged me from reading at times. I found this style of writing really picked up in the third part (making it my least favourite part of the book).

I also think that the way some of the arguments presented were not the most compelling and I feel the strategy for articulating these was primarily to wash me over with technical, bloated language that left me feeling more bored than critical. But perhaps that’s more of a me problem than Carney’s…

Overall, I think I better understand Carney from an ideological POV now, which was the main goal for me seeing as I voted for him (don’t tell my SO’s dad!). Overall Carney seems to be a very economically-focused leader which I think is refreshing in an era of right-wing populism which seems to be allergic to scientific and rational decision-making.