Table Of ContentChristopher Steed spent twelve years in Whitehall, where he worked
on trade policy towards South Africa and deindustrialisation during the
Thatcher years. He is qualified psychotherapist and counsellor and holds
doctorates in sociology and education from the University of Exeter, and in
theology and history from Trinity College, USA. He has worked in education
and in senior management roles in not-for-profit organisations, and has
over twenty years experience as a parish priest. He currently works for the
Diocese of Winchester, developing a community hub for social innovation,
and is a research fellow at Southampton University.
‘A genuinely essential book: it draws from an unusually wide range of
first-hand experience as well as theoretical sophistication, and provides
an unsparing diagnosis of the lethal vacancy at the centre of our culture.
We have so shrunk and redefined what we mean by value that individuals
and institutions alike are going through varieties of inner (and often outer)
disintegration. The challenge is how we are to restore both a connected
social reality and a critical social imagination. Deploying social science,
psychology, ethics and theology together, Chris Steed gives us cause for hope
as well as anxiety.’
Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, former Archbishop
of Canterbury
‘Christopher Steed has written a deeply thoughtful and challenging book. It
is a timely contribution to a debate many more of us should be having.’
Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive, RSA, former Chief Adviser on Political
Strategy to Prime Minister Tony Blair
A Question of Worth
Economy, Society and the
Quantification of Human Value
Christopher Steed
Published in 2016 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
London • New York
www.ibtauris.com
Copyright © Christopher Steed
The right of Christopher Steed to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted
by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof,
may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of images and to acknowledge
statements and citations. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.
References to websites were correct at the time of writing.
ISBN: 978 1 78453 591 9
eISBN: 978 0 85772 954 5
ePDF: 978 0 85772 751 0
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
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Contents
Introduction Setting the Scene – Cameos of Yesterday 1
Chapter One How Did We Get Here? Quantification as a Way
of Life 15
Part One The Social Transmission of Value
Chapter Two The Differentiation of Worth – Life in Layers 23
Chapter Three The Distribution of Worth – You Are What You
Earn 34
Chapter Four The Demonstration of Worth – You Are What You
Own 46
Part Two Capitalism on the Couch
Chapter Five 1st Symptom: Private Lives and Performance Anxiety 59
Chapter Six 2nd Symptom: Power Imbalance – the Sunny Side
of the Street 67
Chapter Seven 3rd Symptom: Poverty and the Lumpen Proletariat 79
Chapter Eight 4th Symptom: Pain – (the Emotional Cost of
Recession) 96
Chapter Nine Excursus: Pathology in the City – Tales of the Left
Behind 107
Chapter Ten 5th Symptom: Performativity and Education 126
Chapter Eleven 5th Symptom (continued): Performativity –
Workplace and Wards 137
Chapter Twelve 6th Symptom: Predatory Behaviour 148
vi Contents
Part Three Marching to a Different Drum
Chapter Thirteen Environments of Value 165
Chapter Fourteen Rebooting Capitalism 176
Chapter Fifteen Visions Seen: High-Value Society and the Goals
of Politics 197
Postscript Through Thick and Thin 210
Notes 220
Index 238
Introduction: Setting the Scene –
Cameos of Yesterday
The great questions of the day are questions of value. Our value and worth
are contingent upon what we earn, what we own and upon the construction
of our identity in the pecking order of contemporary society.
We dwell in a world haunted by escalating inequality and environmental
degradation, a world at risk from global terrorism and impersonal forces. It
is a world where the natural sphere with which we interact so profoundly
has lost its sacred quality and become a resource; a world conditioned by
progressive domination of a monetary scale applied impermissibly across
the board. Amid the astounding technology, the niche consumption and
the financialisation that characterises much of the globe, the prevailing
mood music is that the only values we can usefully measure are expressed in
terms of economics. GDP, the calculation of productivity, the value of goods
and services, measures the wrong things; it says nothing about how far the
economy is creating the good life for people of how the economic jam is
spread. A change is needed in the way we look at the economy. The focus on
quantification, on counting buying and selling, means that our way of life is
characterised by fragmentation and by a short-term focus on profit. That may
be inevitable through forms of association where contract trumps covenant
most of the time but in so doing, the social contract (the implicit pact in
society) is gravely weakened. Erode the economic and you erode the personal.
Our high-octane society brings a pressure that is immense and often
crushing. There has to be a better way of organising things. GDP is an inade-
quate signifier of the health of a nation. A new model for growth is needed
that is not based purely on economic growth.
It is clear to any observer who both looks around and dares to peer
within that the really important issues that frame the contemporary human
situation are those that cannot be measured. How, to invoke Oscar Wilde,
2 A Question of Worth
did we end up knowing the price of everything, but the value of nothing?
What price can be placed on time (the scarce commodity of late modernity)
and on gift (the essence of relationship)? What price on living harmoniously
with nature or community (the two-fold context where we live together in
our common home)? Whether it is called the ‘greater good’, the ‘common
good’ or the ‘collaborative commons’, in the realm where we are more than
isolated entities, measures of quantity and numbers are unavoidable. How
else do you apportion scarce resources? Yet quality is also vital to human
flourishing. What, after all, is wealth for? What kind of society do we want
to be in? What price do we place on the non-quantifiable and non-economic
goods, the things GPD cannot measure, that make life worthwhile? Do we
really want economic and social arrangements that see unemployment or
poverty as personal failings?
Old labels are probably unhelpful except as indicators of broad churches.
Traditionally, the ‘right’ in politics doesn’t get the idea of ‘capacity’: that
whole sections of society lack capacity to further worthwhile goals. As its
foil, very often the ‘left/progressive’ spectrum of politics represents a world
view that has had little theology of wealth creation or the recreating effects of
responsibility. ‘Self-reliance’, however, is only a thin line away from the kind
of independence that erodes mutuality, any concept of reinventing duties to
other people and thinking of other people, not just ourselves. The result of
a society shaped only by economic and monetised transactions is shown up
by what happens when the economy and monetisation of everything fails.
Two hundred years ago, Georg Hegel would have understood this.
Hegel’s book Philosophy of Right (1820) sought to confirm the direction of
the Prussian reformers to bring about a more dynamic and liberal society.1
People are, he suggested, coming to think about themselves in a new way,
as those who give meaning to their lives and are conscious of themselves
as autonomous individuals. For Hegel, the freedom to engage in commerce
and the means to flourish within civil society are both expressions of
this. It is a key area of institutional life and promotes freedom. Though a
strong believer in the marketplace as a place of exchange in which we are
inevitably connected with the interests of others, Hegel did argue that the
contractual model is not appropriate for thinking about human relation-
ships generally.2
Introduction: Setting the Scene – Cameos of Yesterday 3
We struggle to find an account of human value on the contemporary
scene. The classic way of differentiating value was based on correct identity.
This leads to social hierarchy and second-class people. Amid an age of
austerity, we have an economic way of valuing human beings. This leads to
reductionism. We have a way of valuing the human, too, based on status
goods or self-improvement projects. This leads to mere externality: value
judgements divorced from what people are inside.
In these pages, we will explore how the way we live now generates major
issues for the value and worth of people, for humans in harmony with what is
around us and what is within us. We will consider those three main channels
through which human value is shaped and transmitted. Our journey will
take us through contemporary landscapes in which our current model
of economy and society focuses on how what you are worth depends on
measures of quantity – how much you own or earn. These arenas give rise
to significant casualties. The value and worth of people is under assault in
contemporary society, yet questioning this is inescapable. Can we do things
differently? What would a different way of organising the economy look like?
How did we end up with a market society and not just a market economy?
In our exploration of what contemporary society does to the value and worth
of people, it is important to say that I do not wish to offer a miserabilist
account of things. There are plenty of other realities that sit alongside the
costs of our civilisation which one sees played out on social landscapes. To
each of the costs, a list of benefits could be adduced.
I finally finished editing the ideas that constitute this book on the last day
of June 2015. Three terrorist actions had rocked the international community,
ripping up people’s lives in a completely unIslamic disregard for the sanctity
of life. That day, Greece defaulted on a 1.7 billion Euro payment to its inter-
national creditors. Things were on a knife-edge. What became clear was how
poverty, mass unemployment and spiralling inequality fuel social strain,
crime, poor mental health and suicide – leering companions of the brutal
(some would say ‘necessary’) austerity programme that beset Greece in
the wake of the economic crash that saw bailouts given at German rates of
interest. Yet I began to write this book about the way issues of human value are
