Mark Carney, no populist
Some months ago, I was sitting at Mombasa airport waiting for my flight back to Nairobi when my eye caught the cover of a book someone near me was carrying. Its title was “Values”, not at all unusual, but the word was printed upside down, and I wondered why. I asked the gentleman with the book to let me see it more closely, and read that it was “An Economist’s Guide to Everything That Matters”, published in 2021. And who was the author? Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Central Banks of Canada and England… and now the Prime Minister of Canada. I immediately bought a copy of the book.
Why was the word upside down? Because Carney was so concerned about the poor values we are living with these days, and this made his point. His 456-page book opens with his 10-page preface, and just on the first page of that we really get to know the man. He writes about how privileged he was to benefit from all the advantages he did, including with his elite education at Harvard and Oxford. He was with Goldman Sachs for 17 years, and then – and he goes out of his way to say it – it made him very humble as he tried to build a better world for all, while turning challenges into opportunities.
On to the second page, where he tells us he wrote the book because radical changes are needed in the world to overcome the crisis of values – this thanks to the inequalities we are witnessing. It’s all to do with inequalities of wealth, education and health opportunities, with climate change, and with too many valuing the present over the future.
Let me now jump to page nine, where he summarises that the success of an economy is contingent on a set of immutable, fundamental, common values and beliefs, which he lists as:
- dynamism – to help create solutions that channel human creativity
- resilience – to make it easier to bounce back from the shocks while protecting the most vulnerable in society
- sustainability – with long-term perspectives that align incentives across generations
- fairness – particularly in markets to sustain their legitimacy
- responsibility – so that individuals feel accountable for their actions
- solidarity – whereby citizens recognise their obligations to each other and share a sense of community and society
- • humility – to recognise the limits of our knowledge, understanding and power so that we can act as custodians seeking to improve the common good.
Carney has a whole chapter on leadership, which he describes as key, but not in the heroic form of “follow me”. He writes: “In my experience, behavioural and participative forms of leadership underscore the extent to which leadership is less about what leaders achieve themselves and more about both the sense of purpose they impart to their colleagues and the actions they catalyse in pursuit of that objective”.
For him, they must assess the landscape to determine how their organisation can plan the future: “Ambitious leadership means helping to shape the future rather than just reacting to it.” Good leaders combine personal humility, self-knowledge and the ability to learn. This means “admitting mistakes, seeking and accepting feedback and sharing the lessons.
