Fully-automated luxury centrism

On the Panglossian liberalism of Mark Carney

Carney speaking at the annual meeting of the World Economic in 2012. Photo by Michael Wuertenberg.

Last week, I published two pieces on Mark Carney — one in The Baffler, the other in the Toronto Star. Each is somewhat different in its thrust. But both, broadly speaking, deal with his worldview and political vision as I understand them. Since the Star piece was a bit more timely, I’d like to begin there. From it’s opening:

Throughout last spring’s federal election campaign, Mark Carney made liberal use of two very potent slogans from Canada’s political past. The first — about the need for Canadians to become “Masters in our own home” — hailed from Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. The second — a pledge to transform the Canadian economy by “taking control of its economic destiny” — was used in the 1970s and 80s by none other than New Democratic Party leader Ed Broadbent.

The loaded nature of these two turns of phrase will be lost on non-Canadian readers, and I suspect plenty of Canadians who heard them were only dimly aware of their direct historical sources. But, needless to say, whatever voters did think was being conveyed was almost certainly a far cry from the direction Carney’s government has subsequently taken. Both, albeit in different contexts (and languages), gave voice to a kind of economic nationalism that was quintessentially social democratic in character: concerned with public ownership and control over energy and natural resources, the disciplining of market forces by the state and, crucially, the assertion of popular sovereignty against the threat of economic encroachment from without.

Carney surely knows this, which only makes his government’s nascent — and potentially lacerating — austerity program that much more cynical. Between this, and their abrupt pivot towards a strategy of concessions and cajolery vis a vis Donald Trump, Canada’s Liberals are evidently staking their mandate on the calculation they can campaign by posturing as progressive economic nationalists then govern from the neoliberal centre-right without suffering political consequences. I guess we’ll see.

Anyway, if you read my first Substack piece on Carney back in February, you’ll already be familiar with my basic read on him as an arch-technocrat who conceives of political problems as problems of engineering. Digging deeper into Canada’s new prime minister, to say the least, has not given me cause to amend this view. But, though the actual business of doing so was incredibly tedious, I’m glad I subsequently took the time to read hundreds of pages of his prose for my Baffler essay because I do think the experience has helped me to understand him better.

In retrospectively reviewing Carney’s 2021 book Value(s): Building a Better World for All, I was struck by how dense and how shallow it simultaneously manages to be.

Since the financial crisis of 2008-2009, a whole mountain of books in the ethical capitalism genre have been published and, if nothing else, this one probably has more going on than most of them. Thanks in large part to his classical elite education, Carney has a much better command of economic philosophy than your average banker or politician today. He understands that markets are historically contingent institutions and that various thinkers in the Western tradition, from Aristotle through to David Ricardo, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx, have approached the nature of commerce and economic life in radically different ways. He’s also someone who has spent a lot of time directly engaged with their intricacies in his life as a banker, and Value(s) also devotes substantial ink to quite dense and technical excavations deriving from the author’s experience at the commanding heights of global finance.

But what, in the final estimation, is really going on in this book?

For all the things it does to dazzle readers, and despite Carney’s periodic attempts to distance himself from the prevailing market fundamentalism of the past 40 years or so, Value(s) is fundamentally an encomium to the boundless capacity of markets to solve social problems when placed under the right management. Here’s an excerpt from my Baffler essay on this point:

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.

Fundamentally, I think, Mark Carney is someone who believes deeply in our reigning neoliberal consensus while also recognizing its profound unpopularity two and a half decades into the 21st century. Whether writing about the moral and ethical limits of markets in Value(s) or appropriating slogans from a former leader of the New Democratic Party, he thus understands the deep resonance of political language that departs from the conventional market cheerleading.

But, as the first few months of his government clearly demonstrate, this is a strictly aesthetic insight rather than a genuine sign of ideological heterodoxy. The Carney agenda, such as it is, is premised on the belief that there are somehow, still, too many impediments to the smooth functioning of private enterprise: too many burdensome regulations, too many processes for environmental review of infrastructure projects, too many taxes on the “builders and risk takers” whose investments and profits make the world go round, too much bureaucratic fat on a bloated public sector crying out for AI-driven innovations and a few years’ worth of budgets drenched in red ink.

This is, in the most blandly conventional sense possible, a vision of reform through optimization that would have been comfortably at home on the right wing of Tony Blair’s New Labour project or in the discussion papers of the Atari Democrats who spearheaded Bill Clinton’s. Far from representing anything novel or new, it is a throwback to the political and moral complacency of the 1990s — and it will fare no better when it comes to building a better country or a better world.