Pity the Technocrat

The mass protests and political struggles that shaped the 2010s may have failed to reign in global finance, redistribute wealth, or force anything resembling decisive action in the battle against climate change—but, whatever else, they did expose the malign incompetence of our ruling elite. As populist and anti-system politics have swelled across left and right, centrist Brahmins, elected and otherwise, throughout North America and Europe have consequently found themselves on the back foot. Thus, in one sense at least, Canada’s newly minted prime minister, Mark Carney, is something of an outlier in the landscape of twenty-first-century politics—not because he is especially novel but because he is such an emblematic product of the global elite.

Born in the mid-1960s and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, Carney studied at Harvard and Oxford before beginning his career at Goldman Sachs. In 2003, he took up a senior post at the Bank of Canada, ultimately serving as its governor during the global financial crisis and, later, as governor of the Bank of England. Between his departure from that role in 2020 and his entry into politics last January, he worked at one of the world’s largest asset management companies, led the board at Bloomberg, and was involved in various corporate initiatives related to climate change. Until a few short months ago, he had never run for Parliament or even held elected office.

Despite this lack of experience, the effect of Carney’s entry into the Liberal Party of Canada’s leadership race—following the abrupt departure of deeply unpopular Justin Trudeau—was swift. In short order, he not only trounced his rivals, winning 86 percent of the vote on the convention’s first and only ballot, but upended two years of polling that had regularly seen the opposition Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre ahead by double digits. Though the Liberal Party narrowly failed to secure a majority government in the federal election held six weeks later, it nonetheless won seats throughout the country and obtained an unlikely new mandate after years of flagging popular support. (The Conservatives, in turn, saw their once impregnable lead evaporate while the social democratic NDP suffered the worst result in its history.)

Among the most striking things about Carney’s meteoric political rise has been the extent to which his elite background and managerial style have mostly worked to his advantage in a period of generalized hostility toward those exact qualities. On a personal level, he projects an image of competence, reasonableness, and calm, and, whether giving a press conference or facing off against rivals in a TV debate, has tended to speak almost exclusively in the bloodless register of a technocrat. He invokes arcane policy concepts, rattles off numbers, and communicates in the jargon of wonks and civil servants. Even in adversarial settings, he often sounds more like someone chairing a board meeting than a politician campaigning on a set of clearly defined policy objectives or ideological goals. While plenty of centrist leaders try to masquerade unconvincingly as populists, Carney has leaned headfirst into his bona fides as a member of the global elite. “People will say that I’m an elitist or a globalist,” he told former Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci and former Tony Blair strategist Alastair Campbell just a few weeks before his victory in the Liberal leadership race. “Well, that’s exactly what we need.”

Carney’s agenda to date has been more or less exactly what you might expect from a politician with this outlook. Upon becoming prime minister, he abruptly eliminated an increase to the capital gains tax introduced just last year by Trudeau’s government, along with its once signature carbon pricing initiative. He is pursuing a huge increase in military spending and has touted a deficit-financed infrastructure program that will leverage public money to attract private capital for investments in housing and the energy sectors. Having espoused the language of nation-building and talked up the need for ambitious projects during the recent election campaign, his government now looks poised to initiate sweeping cuts to public programs over the next few years.

In a less uneasy political context, Carney’s technocratic pitch and blandly conservative political program could easily have fallen flat. Thanks to Donald Trump’s belligerence, they instead resonated across an anxious Canadian electorate—and, in turn, have given technocratic politics an improbable second wind. In light of this, it is worth considering a few larger questions: Does Carney’s election signify a wider centrist renaissance? Can he help rejuvenate a global liberalism that increasingly finds itself squeezed by populists, from both left and right?

Notwithstanding his rather boring and dispassionate political style, Canada’s new prime minister has not been shy about articulating his philosophy and prescriptions for a brighter tomorrow. For the past fifteen years, Carney has steadily built a public image around the outmoded idea that our ruling liberal capitalist order might be made more humane with a patina of ethics and social compassion. His 2021 book Value(s): Building a Better World For All offers a protracted version of this argument, drawing variously on the author’s front row seat during the financial crisis, his climate activism in the corporate world, and his interpretation of economic history.

Since 2008, ethical capitalism books have been something of a growth industry and, for what it’s worth, Carney’s own foray into the genre makes for more interesting reading than some of its competitors. Throughout its roughly six hundred pages, the author comes across as an earnest believer in the tenets of liberal capitalism: a consummate insider attuned to the market’s moral limitations yet utterly convinced of its fundamental nobility and capacity to solve global problems.

The book’s most interesting sections are almost all contained in its first one hundred pages, which see the author exploring competing theories of value throughout the history of economic philosophy. Touching variously on the work of figures like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx, Carney gives us a perfectly serviceable account of the key questions at stake: Is economic value rooted in the utility of an object or good (as imagined by Aristotle), or is it a fundamentally subjective property that can only be established through commercial exchange (broadly, the view of neoclassical economists today)? To what extent should economic relationships be allowed to shape social relations and how do these, in turn, determine the nature of production and exchange? Here, he contrasts his own outlook with that of market fundamentalists like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and even offers some apt observations about the social implications of a market society in the present: “Market value is [now] taken to represent intrinsic value,” he writes. “And if a good or activity is not in the market, it is not valued. We are approaching the extremes of commodification as commerce expands deep into the personal and civic realms. The price of everything is becoming the value of everything.”

In one way or another, some version of this distinction forms the backbone of the whole book. Carney is both sufficiently curious about the history of economics and knowledgeable enough about the practical workings of commerce and high finance to understand that markets have limits and that global capitalism has real and abiding problems. Yet for all his intellectual curiosity, he exhibits few signs of having meaningfully grappled or engaged with any of its more serious modern critics—a distressing omission in a moment defined by economic dysfunction, ecological collapse, and (at the time of the book’s publication) a global pandemic.

With the exception of Marx, to whom Carney devotes roughly two-and-a-half pages, there is scant treatment of socialist and non-liberal analyses of markets since the nineteenth century (Karl Polanyi being a particularly notable omission). His ostensible purpose throughout is to critique the system he’s discussing and propose alternatives, but even his more perceptive observations about markets—they are, for instance, “indifferent to human suffering and can be blind to our greatest needs”—tend to be prefaced with effusive comments about their unparalleled dynamism: “Having worked at the centre of markets all my life, I know they are the most powerful instrument we’ve ever created.”

The most unsatisfying aspect of Value(s) is the clear dissonance between the more insightful and critical parts of its analysis and the barren minimalism of its prescriptions. Having traversed centuries of economic philosophy and history to set down the premise that there are structural and moral limitations in the workings of markets, Carney proceeds to offer us solutions that are gobsmackingly hazy and uninspired. Essentially, he wants private enterprise and the people at its commanding heights to embrace a more enlightened idea of self-interest and more ethically robust notions of corporate social responsibility. Deeming large firms “the engine of value creation in a modern economy,” he in turn suggests they might consider “maximizing value” not only for shareholders but also with a view to the wider public good: “Profit is essential but it must be achieved in a manner that creates shared value for all stakeholders . . . a company’s highest purpose is to provide solutions, in a profitable manner, and contribute in its own way to the betterment of society.”

The idea of profit balanced with social responsibility is, to say the least, far from a pioneering suggestion two decades into the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, Carney is (somehow) evidently still of the view that global capitalism can be reformed through a mixture of gentle regulation and moral persuasion. “If left unattended,” he writes in the book’s introduction, “[markets] will corrode [the values of society]. We must concentrate on rebuilding social capital to make markets work. To do so, individuals and their firms must rediscover their sense of solidarity and responsibility for the system.” In this spirit, Value(s) concludes with a series of short reflections on the importance of personal values, like humility and responsibility, that the author presumably hopes his readers—especially in the business world—will adopt.

Having spent much of the preceding six hundred pages reading about imploding financial markets, accelerating environmental degradation, and the erosion of the social contract, we are finally—and confusingly—left with a vision for reform that revolves mainly around elite cooperation and the fostering of a more ethically minded business class. Carney could have been radicalized by his close-up view of the global financial crisis, but if anything it only appears to have strengthened his belief in the transformative power of markets and the capacity of liberal capitalism to harness them for the public good. Here, there is little that separates Carney from other denizens of the Davos sect with whom he has spent the past few decades rubbing shoulders. In the book’s acknowledgements, he credits the likes of Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates for enriching his views in areas like climate change and what he calls “the future of value.” This is merely one of many hints at how the gilded milieu in which Carney has operated has informed, and ultimately limited, his worldview.

In the many stories and anecdotes strewn throughout the book, we invariably find the author plying his trade in extravagant settings, and in conversation with interlocutors perched at the highest echelons of global business and finance. This is a world that runs primarily on elite brokerage: one of endless summits, non-binding resolutions, and self-important declarations negotiated by small coteries of powerful people. It is an insular universe populated by procedurally minded elites educated at a handful of prestigious universities; ill-disposed to asking fundamental questions about the global system they manage yet utterly convinced of their own rectitude and capacity to act as the vanguards of social progress. 

All this helps account for the frustrating disconnect between the diagnoses Carney offers in Value(s) and his proposed solutions. In the political cosmology of Carney-ism, contentious issues of policy and ideology are reduced to either matters of individual ethics or problems of engineering. Viewed this way, there is no need to countenance any more profound critique of markets or liberal capitalism. Instead, global malaises like economic inequality and climate change arise mainly from bad incentives, and can thus be rectified through more enlightened management and more socially conscious enterprise. The system, in the very sense once suggested by classical economists, is thus fundamentally self-correcting. With a little moral persuasion, a fresh dose of administrative competence, and a few light-touch regulations, a kinder, gentler, and greener global capitalism can be ours for the taking.

As prime minister, Carney has quickly put this misguided view of democratic governance to work. Essentially, his economic strategy aims to spur growth with the usual cocktail of tax cuts and business incentives. Proposing deep cuts to Canada’s public sector, he also hopes to optimize it through largely unspecified “innovation” and has even appointed a new “Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation” partly to this end. Amid a possible global recession, a massive increase in military (rather than social) expenditure will partly serve as an economic stimulus, while the federal government will wield new powers to fast-track the construction of new oil pipelines and other natural resource projects. Even Carney’s posture toward Trump—the very thing that enabled him to get elected in the first place—has quickly softened. This is, to say the least, neither a creative or novel approach to governance and, in an era of profound economic and political crisis, seems far more likely to exacerbate problems than to solve them.

But if Carney has given this elitist vision new life in a populist age, it is mostly because it has been made psychologically compelling by recent events. The ongoing dysfunction of global capitalism, the resurgent authoritarian right, and the continued breakdown of the liberal order since 2008 have, among other things, fostered a broad yearning for order and stability. Changing society, even in positive ways, tends to be disruptive and messy—and, as the 2010s attest, attempts to change it on a national or global level will inevitably fail more often than they will succeed. In the face of this dispiriting reality, technocratic politics offer up the alluring but delusional assurance that our biggest problems can be fixed through conventional means by traditional elites: without the discomforting fracas of political conflict or any profound reordering of the economic settlement.  

Needless to say, the elites who led us here aren’t going to solve the problems they’ve helped create and, if anything, Carney’s Value(s) is testament less to the creative rejuvenation of elite liberal thinking in a populist age than to its ongoing paralysis in a restless world still crying out for change of the real kind.