A Question of Worth: Economy, Society and the Quantification of Human Value

by Chris Steed

Overview

We live in a world that has become a resource, a world conditioned by the progressive domination of a monetary scale applied across the board. Our value and worth are contingent upon what we earn, on what we own. Amidst the increasing financialisation that characterises much of the globe, the prevailing ethos is that the only values we can usefully measure are those that can be quantified and expressed in terms of economics.
Yet economic value and the value of the human are closely connected: erode the economic and you erode the personal. In the global economic crash of recent years it has been people who have been under assault not just financial value. The vulnerability of a society shaped solely by economic and monetised transactions is exposed when the economy and the monetisation of everything fails. When the economic machine seizes up, it is people who are devalued and dumped.
Drawing upon his experience in government, education and the Church, the author asks: Must we be a market society as well as a market economy? Can we devise a non-economic account of describing human value and worth?
Christopher Steed argues that the really important issues that frame the contemporary human situation are those that cannot be measured. Quality is also vital to human flourishing: what, after all, is wealth for? In this timely and important work, the author calls for a wider concept of value – one that encompasses both economic value and human value - and for a society that cultivates the importance of the human.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784535919
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	09/14/2016
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Christopher Steed is a Research Fellow at Southampton University. He spent twelve years in Whitehall, where he worked on trade policy towards South Africa during the Thatcher years and deindustrialisation. He has twenty years experience as a parish priest and currently works for the Diocese of Winchester, is a qualified psychotherapist and counsellor and holds doctorates in sociology and education from the University of Exeter, and in theology and history from Trinity College. He has also worked in education and in senior management roles in not-for-profit organisations.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Setting the Scene - Cameos of Yesterday 1

Chapter 1 How Did We Get Here? Quantification as a Way of Life 15

Part 1 The Social Transmission of Value

Chapter 2 The Differentiation of Worth - Life in Layers 23

Chapter 3 The Distribution of Worth - You Are What You Earn 34

Chapter 4 The Demonstration of Worth - You Are What You Own 46

Part 2 Capitalism on the Couch

Chapter 5 1st Symptom: Private Lives and Performance Anxiety 59

Chapter 6 2nd Symptom: Power Imbalance - the Sunny Side of the Street 67

Chapter 7 3rd Symptom: Poverty and the Lumpen Proletariat 79

Chapter 8 4th Symptom: Pain - (the Emotional Cost of Recession) 96

Chapter 9 Excursus: Pathology in the City - Tales of the Left Behind 107

Chapter 10 5th Symptom: Performativity and Education 126

Chapter 11 5th Symptom (continued): Performativity - Workplace and Wards 137

Chapter 12 6th Symptom: Predatory Behaviour 148

Part 3 Marching to a Different Drum

Chapter 13 Environments of Value 165

Chapter 14 Rebooting Capitalism 176

Chapter 15 Visions Seen: High-Value Society and the Goals of Politics 197

Postscript: Through Thick and Thin 210

Notes 220

Index 238