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

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 and own. Amidst the financialization that characterizes 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 only by economic and monetized transactions is exposed by what happens when the economy and the monetization 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, and driven by his long experience of dealing with the casualties of contemporary society, 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? What kind of society do we want to be in? What price is given to the non-quantifiable and non-economic goods that make life worthwhile? In a timely and pioneering work, the author argues for a wider concept of value-one that encompasses both economic value and human value-allowing the dominant economic model to be re-calibrated to give greater space to human value.

Christopher Steed is a Research Fellow at Southampton University. He spent twelve years as a civil servant in Whitehall, where he worked on trade policy towards South Africa during the Thatcher years and de-industrialization. He also has held senior management roles in a number of non-profit organizations. He is a qualified psychotherapist and counselor, and holds doctorates in sociology and education from Exeter University (UK) and in theology and history from Trinity College, Indiana. He has twenty years of experience as a parish priest and currently works for the Church of England.