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The Reith Lectures

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Significant international thinkers deliver the BBC's flagship annual lecture series.

The Reith Lectures - From Moral to Market Sentiments

The Reith Lectures: 2020: From Moral to Market Sentiments

From Moral to Market Sentiments

2020

BBC Parliament - The Reith Lectures, 2020, From Moral to Market Sentiments

Mark Carney reflects on the meaning of value.

Mark Carney reflects on the meaning of value, how the ways we assess it shape our values and constrain our choices, and how market valuations affect our society's values.

In this first lecture, recorded with a virtual audience, Mark Carney reflects that whenever he could step back from what felt like daily crisis management, the same deeper issues loomed. What is value? How does the way we assess value both shape our values and constrain our choices? How do the valuations of markets affect the values of our society?

Carney argues that society has come to embody Irish writer Oscar Wilde's old aphorism: 'Knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing.'

A version for television of the programme first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday 2 December.

The Reith Lectures: 2020

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Mark Carney charts how we have come to esteem financial value over human value.

Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England, argues that changing attitudes to value and the marketplace have contributed to a trio of crises: credit, Covid and climate.

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The Reith Lectures

2020

From Moral to Market Sentiments

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