Oscar Wilde famously said that a cynic “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Mark Carney’s book, Value(s): Building a Better World for All, repurposes this aphorism to describe how society operates today. He argues that markets are largely incapable of valuing — and hence protecting for future generations — the civic and natural systems on which we depend: health care, education, trees, aquifers, tillable land, etc.

Carney comes with Harvard and Oxford credentials and a long tenure in the money business behind him, having spent thirteen years at Goldman Sachs and well over a decade in the world of central banking. As such, he offers an insider’s view of what ails modern capitalism. Whatever merits his diagnosis may have, his prescription won’t do ordinary people any good.

The publication of Value(s) came with praise from Britain’s former chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, the European Central Bank president, Christine Lagarde, and — inevitably — U2’s Bono. According to the Observer’s Will Hutton, Carney’s principled rejection of “free-market capitalism” constitutes a “landmark achievement” that will “help arm the best in business, finance and government and disarm the worst.”