Values

“ The price of everything is becoming the value of everything.

“ The price of everything is becoming the value of everything. ” e.style.display='none');if(typeof getContentsSections==='function')setTimeout(getContentsSections,50)" /> Carney's core thesis is alarming. Over centuries, economic theory shifted from objective value (rooted in production and labor, from Aristotle through Marx) to subjective value (price equals worth, from the neo-classicists onward). This shift was initially academic — but it escaped the textbook. Today, the logic of buying and selling governs healthcare allocation, education, environmental protection, even civic life. We've moved from a market economy to a market society. Consider the Amazon paradox. Amazon the company carries a $1.5 trillion valuation reflecting expected future profits. The Amazon rainforest — which regulates the global climate and harbors millions of species — appears on no ledger until it's stripped bare for cattle. The costs to climate and biodiversity of its destruction are invisible to markets. What isn't priced isn't valued. What isn't valued gets destroyed. TAKEAWAY 2

“ …unchecked market fundamentalism devours the social capital essential for the long-term dynamism of capitalism itself. ” e.style.display='none');if(typeof getContentsSections==='function')setTimeout(getContentsSections,50)" /> Putting a fee on a moral obligation transforms it into a transaction. At an Israeli day-care center, fines for late pickup caused lateness to increase — parents treated the fine as a price, removing the social stigma of inconveniencing teachers. Richard Titmuss showed the UK's voluntary blood-donation system outperformed America's paid one. In a fundraising experiment, students motivated purely by charitable purpose raised more money than those offered a 1% commission. Carney calls this the commercialisation effect: commodifying a good can corrode its character. Standard economics assumes pricing an activity adds monetary incentive on top of existing moral motivation. The evidence shows these motives are often substitutes, not complements — and the monetary one can extinguish the moral one entirely. TAKEAWAY 3

“ All ideologies are prone to extremes, and capitalism loses its sense of moderation when the belief in the power of the market enters the realm of faith. ” e.style.display='none');if(typeof getContentsSections==='function')setTimeout(getContentsSections,50)" /> Three defining crises, one pattern. The financial crisis arose from misvaluing risk — light-touch regulation, the delusion that securitization had eliminated danger, and banks deemed too big to fail operating in a 'heads I win, tails you lose' bubble. The Covid catastrophe arose from undervaluing resilience — governments ignored warnings, depleted stockpiles, and left pandemic plans unfinanced. The climate emergency persists because we don't price carbon externalities or weigh the welfare of future generations. In each case, market fundamentalism — the faith that the market is always right and that adding more markets solves market failures — obscured catastrophic risks. The $15 trillion in bailouts after 2008, the trillions lost to Covid, and the looming…