Mark Carney’s Values (2022) blends Catholic doctrine with Marxist critiques, arguing modern capitalism prioritizes profit over human dignity despite its ideological roots in Adam Smith and Fukuyama’s "end of history" thesis. He rejects state socialism but advocates "mission-oriented capitalism," using legal reforms—like net-zero mandates—and financial incentives to align markets with climate sustainability and social equity, framing it as a purpose-driven alternative to unchecked market fundamentalism. His work subtly refutes class-conflict narratives while exposing how post-1980s deregulation fractured global North social contracts, offering a technocratic yet moral framework for economic reform. [Automatically generated summary]
This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections and roots of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
My name is Matthew Remsky.
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Short bonus episode today in which I'll be flagging some of the religious influences buried within Mark Carney's technocratic charisma.
Mark Carney is a devout Catholic.
He opens his big 2022 book with an anecdote about receiving a spiritual mission from Pope Francis.
So I'll get back to that in detail.
The book is called Values, Building a Better World for All, and it's Carney's meditation on the perennial tension between market values and human values.
He makes the incredibly unoriginal observation that modern society has mistakenly allowed the former to override the latter.
To explain this logic, he surprisingly relies on Marxist theories of surplus labor value, the instability of markets based on profit motives, and the tendency for monopolies to become authoritarian.
But because in his analysis, the state socialist projects of the 20th century were all irredeemable failures, his medicine is liberal.
Markets are social constructs that must be grounded in solidarity, responsibility, and resilience to effectively serve the public good.
He talks about a purpose-driven approach to capitalism that prioritizes long-term goals such as climate sustainability and social equity.
His critique of state socialism is pretty standard capitalist exceptionalism.
Managed economies, he says, are inefficient, hostile to innovation and creativity.
He thinks Smith's invisible hand has proven superior to planned production, and he agrees with Fukuyama that the tear down of the Berlin Wall marked the end of capitalist socialist struggle.
He's even a bit of a dialecticist in that the problem, he says, is partly that the collapse of communist regimes at the end of the 1980s reinforced a global shift toward market fundamentalism.
So he thinks the pendulum has just swung too far and it can come back to the center.
Part of his answer is that instead of managing or planning, our economic activities must be imbued with purpose and values.
And so a lot of the book talks about very aspirational things like purpose-driven corporations, mission-oriented public policy, and to stop equating price with value.
Now, how would he encourage or enforce these aspirations in government?
Well, oddly, it sounds like it involves some planning.
He admits that a purpose-driven economy cannot be achieved through voluntary corporate social responsibility alone.
He believes it requires marshaling markets through legal reforms, mandatory reporting, and restructured financial incentives.
So Carney is the prophet for a system of mission-oriented capitalism where the state sets clear societal goals, such as net zero transition, and then uses regulatory and fiscal levers to direct the power of the market towards those ends.
Now, the overriding premise here is that we're all in this together.
We can all pull together and do this.
And in that calm, measured guidance and technical tweaking, we can persuade capital in the most beneficent direction.
Now, this is not new.
I think one of the main purposes of it is to dispel any possibility that capitalism in any form foments class conflict.
Carney doesn't mention this, but he does bemoan that market fundamentalism has eroded the social contracts of many global North nations.
Persuading Capital Beneficently00:00:26
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