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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

4 A Question of Worth
constantly generated in our world at the end of 2008. Here are snapshots of life
taken from one month as 2009, a year rich in anniversaries, waited to unfold.
Think of value and most will think of economics. There is a strong
resonance between economic value and the value of the people whose activity
it describes – a resonance best understood through its opposite. When banks
and markets fail, it is people who are devalued and devastated. The collapse
of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers one September Sunday sent
the markets into a nosedive.
3
It signalled a collapse in confidence and an
economic crisis unique in modern times. The globe had not witnessed a
synchronised slump on this scale since the Great Depression. Everywhere,
consumer demand fell. Overnight, capital became scarce, crippling Eastern
Europe. Trade flows dried up, affecting countries dependent on exports,
from China and Japan to Germany. Across the world, companies were forced
to slash production, postpone plans and lay off workers in their millions.
4
There is an intriguing resonance between economic value and the value of
the human. The global economic downturn was a crisis for both. Whenever
the financial system is simply increasing its own value, the link between wealth
and well-being is strained. Humans become pushed to the margin by global
financial flows. Impersonal economic forces devalue those unable to work
or to sell. Society creaks under the pressure. Governments everywhere tried
desperately to pull levers to manipulate the struggling global economy. Value
lay at the heart of the economic crisis. The recession of 2008–9 saw share
prices tumbling and billions wiped off asset values. As the biggest financial
crash since the 1930s was beginning to bite, it was the people themselves who
got bitten.
In another landscape that month, in the wake of yet another well
publicised death of a child known by social services to be at risk, that of Baby
Peter, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet declared, ‘Children,
the most precious and vulnerable members of our societies, deserve closer
attention to their care and education and better protection against abuse’.
5
Such shocking events pointed to a far greater incidence of child
maltreatment than official statistics suggest: substantial under-reporting of
child maltreatment by schools and physicians to child-support agencies;
the need for multidisciplinary teams for effective maltreatment prevention;
and acceptance of child welfare as a human right. It was said that around a

Introduction: Setting the Scene – Cameos of Yesterday 5
million children in the UK at that time might have experienced neglect or
outright abuse – verbal, physical or sexual. The media storm in the UK over
the death of a child who was not protected by social services highlighted the
effect that dysfunctional lives have on those involved.
At the end of 2008, Indians witnessed on their TV screens gunfighters
shooting up the main railway station in Mumbai, engaging in a hotel siege
and killing 160 people. A few days later came a trial, the first opportunity that
still-grieving relatives had to take the measure of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
the man who confessed to masterminding the terrorist attacks on New
York, known now in history as 9/11. The World Trade Center in New York,
symbol of global capitalism, was targeted. Hijacked planes flew into the
two skyscrapers and as the towers crumbled, so did any safe certainties.
Manhattan’s two front teeth had been knocked out and the world entered a
new era. The defendant was unrepentant. He refused legal counsel from a
man who had fought in Iraq and killed his brothers and sisters, and pleaded
guilty, knowing that a guilty verdict would result in the death penalty.
Mohammad and other defendants were keen to be martyrs, indeed had
been looking forward to being so for a long time.
6
That ambition highlighted
the way that the ideology he promoted had no respect for life. People were
disposable pawns to be sacrificed for the cause.
Governments everywhere had become agitated by forces raging against
them, which seemed to emanate from an alien planet, a mentality far removed
from the familiar assertions and safe assumptions of those who ruled the
political world. The masters of the universe struggled to comprehend what was
driving those crazies, the fanatics who were willing to blow themselves to bits
to further their cause. The face of what governments called ‘terrorism’ was well
known to history. The realisation of some cause, usually national freedom of a
minority or liberation of the oppressed masses, meant bombers and assassins
had regularly fired above the parapet. Missiles, rockets and guns we under-
stood. But it was not easy to confront ideologies that appeared to use humans
as weapons or had a theology of sacrifice and martyrdom. It was unnerving.
On a lesser and occasional basis, the violence that trashes sacred life is
a regular companion of human affairs. Crime statistics have long been kept
by governments, but the first annual ‘Hate Crime Report’ in the UK was
published at the end of 2008. Hate crime includes offences committed against

6 A Question of Worth
people because of sexuality, disability, age, gender (including domestic
violence), race and religion. The figure for such prosecutions during the three
years prior to 2008 was more than 200,000.
7
The figure for abuse of women
went far beyond that. By some estimates, 2 million females, in the UK alone,
during that year would experience some form of domestic violence, direct
abuse, rape or harassment – just because of their gender.
8
Along with class-based social divisions, the various types of hate crime
were markers of the way the world had been divided up. The fight for equal
status was the voice of those urging gender equality, of the struggle to throw
off colonial administration, and of the civil rights movement in the heady
emancipation of the 1960s. Birmingham, Alabama, encapsulated the struggle
that black people in America had endured for centuries. Four people out of
ten were African American. In one area of the city, Kelly Ingram Park, unedu-
cated, poor black families risked their lives to be treated as equal. ‘Uppity
niggers’ dared to live outside the neighbourhoods designated for them by
white Americans and, as a result, they had been dynamited. Across the city,
there was a protected enclave where ambitious black families could start
businesses, embark on academic study and try to shut out the racism around
them. They still used the ‘Blacks-only’ hospital, The Holy Family. One child
born at that hospital was the future secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. The
all-white baseball team had dropped out of its league to avoid black-and-
white people mixing together. African Americans could not go to the zoo
unless it was their designated day. The Police Chief ordered fire hoses and
police dogs to be used against black protesters and their children. The images
shocked the world. Thanks to her determined mother, Condoleezza Rice
managed to avoid what Martin Luther King, Jr called ‘the ominous clouds
of inferiority’ in her mental sky. She went on to become George W. Bush’s
secretary of state despite the abusive racism that surrounded her childhood.
9

Those days were passing. For much of the US (except for perhaps in policing),
racist attitudes appeared to be nasty relics of the past. As Rice was leaving
her post, in December 2008, Barack Obama, the first black US president, was
preparing to take office.
The last month of 2008 witnessed a social explosion. The spark was Greek
police killing a teenager. It could have happened anywhere. But the incident
lit a fuse. Soon, the capital, Athens, was on fire. Discontent rose to the

Introduction: Setting the Scene – Cameos of Yesterday 7
surface: discontent with the dead hand of administrative bureaucracy, with
corruption, but, above all, with life at the bottom of the Athenian pile. Sooner
or later, those whom the gods relegate are bound to react. The ancient Greeks
called it ‘hubris’. This was followed in France by demonstrations in the best
traditions of urban legend and some innovative forms of social protest, like
the picnic in a supermarket. Amid the shelves, protesters squatted in the
aisles and just helped themselves! The Greek crisis was to come full circle.
Taken together, these events were a signpost to a profound crisis in our
civilisation, of which the economic devaluation was a marker. These cameos
taken at random from life at the end of 2008 have at least one thread running
through them. They are about the conversion of humans into objects, into
commodities, about the failure to nurture and value the human dimension.
In different guises, they are a breach of what it means to be human. Either
that, or they illustrate the contradictions of human existence. Shrouding our
world is the spectre of dehumanisation, a dehumanisation that makes us ask
why we are compelled to live as if we had any value?
What links these different fields of twenty-first-century life together is
that they are different forms of value. In this book, we are going to focus
on the way economy and society are organised so as to generate issues of
human value and worth, constantly played out to any concerned commen-
tator. Disciplinary boundaries have shunted them into different arenas for
purposes of classification. In the nineteenth century, political economy used
to be about economy and society taken together. Perhaps the twenty-first
century will witness their re-union. In the market economy, supply and
demand all come together like scissors to fix the value of assets, property
and the monetised worth of labour. Power relations that govern our lives in
broader society both express and communicate hierarchies of importance.
Economic issues can hardly be separated from the analysis of power relations
in which they operate. Neither can they be separated from the value and
worth of the social actors, the participants in firms and organisations whose
well-being is vital for productive and happy environments. Environmental
concerns form a massive agenda in our time: the value placed on the
environment, and those who live and work the land, is up for grabs in the

8 A Question of Worth
high-carbon world we have created and it is deeply intertwined with the
economy and our social order.
Tributaries for this Project
This project has had a number of personal tributaries, each of which brings
a particular focus but which, taken together, hopefully flow into something
bigger: it is a broad-brush and, indeed, fresh take on economy and society
that tries to show the causality and the casualties of ceaseless quantification
of a system that by its nature keeps wanting more and more and therefore
visits such pressure on people.
Firstly, I had 12 years in management and policy work in Whitehall,
London. My posts at the Department of Trade and Industry – as it was before
migrating to the Department of Industry – gave me a window on exports
and trade policy, particularly against the backdrop of the apartheid-era
response to South Africa (which was and remains a key supplier of vital raw
materials). In addition, I witnessed the huge shift in our industrial policy
during the 1980s, when manufacturing and mining went down during
Margaret Thatcher’s years in government and a service economy became
dominant. Time in the Marine Division of what then ended up in the
Department of Transport grounded me in the era of globalisation, enabled
by container ships that began to dominate the oceans.
Ten years in education and in the not-for-profit sector provided very
different insights on to different worlds where issues of human value and
worth are sharply played out. Teaching history and, to a lesser extent,
philosophy and RE (as well as psychology and sociology to A-level in Adult
Education), it struck me how the agenda to raise standards in order to
obtain productivity through results was decisive in shaping the experience
of contemporary education. Those convictions surrounding the impact of
education being a strategic issue both nationally and in the international
stakes, have left me clear on the need to broaden considerably our view
of what constitutes success. They are underlined by a number of years’
experience of school governance, linked with work in the parish where
league tables were hot topics of anxious conversation.
Twenty years’ parish experience gave me a lens on life that has few parallels

Introduction: Setting the Scene – Cameos of Yesterday 9
outside of being a GP. For anyone with imagination and empathy, work of
this sort grounds you in the lives and realities of ordinary people, hearing
their concerns and attempting to grasp the pressures upon them. If they sense
you are interested, people are often willing to confide in you because they
recognise that the discussion is neither judgemental nor ‘official’. Ten of those
years were spent on tough housing estates where the English riots erupted in
2011, and also in South London. I learnt firsthand about poverty, crime and
social exclusion, but also about the gang culture that disfigures our cities amid
a very real search to belong. No one can work on these estates without being
touched by the odd, but very human mix of brave community, keeping the
human spirit alive amid the taut neuroticism that blights people’s lives where
deprivation is more than just a word, and where drugs and drink addiction
can be the default position. The banality and the reality of poverty and cold
damp houses are the daily grind for many, struggling to make ends meet, sort
out the benefits and find work that is better than merely low grade. I witnessed
the emotional impact of unemployment, as well as the pressure on hospitals
as parishioners had to negotiate waiting lists and try to find a route through
significant health problems. It became clear talking to real people about real
problems, that concerns about immigration do not arise, in general, from a
spectre of the foreigner, but rather from the ways in which communities feel
swamped by pressure on jobs, housing and public services. In the area just
north of Tottenham, where I worked, there were over 60 different nationalities
jostling together. Immersion in people’s lives in this way prevents one being
merely a flâneur, a stroller, walking in the anonymous spaces of the modern
city, experiencing the complexity, disturbances and confusions of the streets,
taking in the fleeting beauty and transitory impressions of the crowds.
10
Though going on to work in very different contexts, a further ten-years’
parish experience subsequently provided alternative lenses through which
to try to understand the lives of those I was part of. During those years, I
was involved in local groups of highly motivated people, working hard to
make their communities places where humans can thrive. In many rural
districts, it became clear how the need for affordable homes jostles against
economic pressures that are driving all but the rich or professional retired
out of our communities. Working as a counsellor, as well as minister in
several churches, and being a registered member of the British Association

10 A Question of Worth
of Counselling and Psychotherapy provided a steady stream of clients.
Endeavouring to understand their situation yielded vital insights that helped
me frame this project and also integrate theory with practice. The encounters
were deeply instructive. What began a period of sustained reflection in client
observation was noticing how, in various domains, issues of worth were
being constantly generated when people were facing its erosion. Either it was
having a negative impact on them or it was resulting in what I came to call
‘the Protest’ – ‘I’m worth more than that!’ – issued in quasi-economic terms,
as if the worth people felt they had was being compared with a falling share
price or a paltry offer for their house. In the same way that a Geiger counter
registers the presence of radioactivity, these reactions seemed to be clues
to the presence of a force in our psyche or the social world that motivates
a good deal of human action. This book is a ‘reflection as research’, tuning
into the value struggles, which are being moulded by social forces, faced by
individuals. Describing three factors generating disvaluing – indifference,
inequality (diminishing) and indignity – was a qualitative response to client
observation, which, I suggest, could be replicated empirically.
On being repeatedly struck by how many clients spoke of experiences of
devaluation and how they expressed their indignation in terms of value –‘I’m
worth more than that!’ – I wanted to examine the role that worth and value
play in everyday life. There is a danger in seemingly being able to explain
things without bothering to try to prove them; it is the classic fallacy known
by its Latin tag, post hoc ergo propter – arguing from how we act to infer
why we act as we do. So, given the difficulties of verifying inter-subjective
experience and without empirical tests using survey data, reported experi-
ences about this have to be approached with care. In client observation, I
began to look into the statements people made that implied that issues of
value were generated along the power lines of human exchanges. It was a
form of participant observation. The question I set out to answer stemmed
from intrigue. Why were human narratives, often of distress, generating state-
ments about human value or its erosion?
In the fields of education, management and counselling through which I
have wandered, professional qualifications have sharpened the perspective.
But it was a masters in social theory and then post-doctoral work in social
sciences that helped considerably to give an academic edge to the journey

Introduction: Setting the Scene – Cameos of Yesterday 11
I was immersed in. I could more readily discern how reports of individual
distress were mirrored by what was going on in the world around, most
notably the economic car crash of 2008. An interactive dialogue between
the local and personal seemed to go hand in hand with global forces bearing
down. Trying to get my head round critical pedagogy in education with its
sharp analysis of power, as well as a thesis using qualitative research, gave
me conceptual tools with which to understand the world more critically.
The practitioner journey I was immersed in meant these ideas were rooted
in lived experience and were never allowed to be ‘just academic’. It was a
transformative time.
I have in addition hugely enjoyed and benefited from being a member
of many of the myriad networks that have sprung up in recent years to link
people together in fruitful dialogue. Membership of such varied spaces as
Amnesty International, the Shared Value Initiative, Global Justice Now, the
Plymouth Social Enterprise Network and especially the Royal Society of
Arts (RSA) have provided another frame of reference. The latter has been
especially helpful as a catalyst for bringing together fellow travellers in a
very exciting journey about the other world that is already under the radar
of the mainstream way of organising economy and society. Mixing with
some remarkable people, I learnt more about what it means to align and
empower those fighting for social, environmental and economic justice.
Membership and involvement with the British Sociological Association
has been a feeder to this project, which proved invaluable. Another
tributary may be mentioned: a link with a digital management consultancy.
There we thought about the issue of technological displacement, rolling
like a tide towards us as computers learn to think and so many jobs are
automated away.
I do not claim to have had senior roles in these fields in my journey. It
is I hope the breadth of the varied experiences at the coalface that gives a
well-rounded insight into how issues of the day are issues of value. For me at
least, grasping how the felt value of people is thrown up (and often thrown
out) is a strong lens on contemporary society. What was emerging both from
immersion in parish life and client observation is that the drive to feel and
assert human worth clarifies social dynamics. I went on to develop a theory
about this and then to assess how the drive to say, ‘we count … we matter’ is

12 A Question of Worth
expressed in the ‘voice-and-choice’ society that seems to be emerging. Those
concerns are for potential follow-up volumes.
In the economic car crash that heralded the great recession of our time, what
has been under assault is not just financial value but people: people under
immense strain. We need not be a market society as well as market economy.
If we grasp the pressures of modern society, the dominant economic narrative
can be re-calibrated so as to give more space to be human and another story
told. The task is urgent; the fourth Industrial Revolution is already engulfing
us threatening to widen the gulf between those that can keep up and thrive
and those that will join the ranks of the left behind.
‘We are people not products.’ Value is a storm centre in contemporary
society the value placed on assets, the value of property, the value of stocks
and shares, as well as less tangible values such as the value of the environment
and the value of community. The particular focus of this book is somewhat
different: the value of the human. It is about what happens to the value of
people in contemporary society. The usual way of referring to what someone
is worth is economic. A purely economic conception does not begin to sum
up who we think we are, however. Often people respond from a very different
space, transcending the external valuation placed upon them as they protest
their value. ‘I consider myself an intelligent, articulate woman so I’m worth
more than the £6 an hour I’m paid on minimum wage’, declares a female
interviewee.
11
What a curious statement, with unsuspecting depth!
Producing goods and services on an industrial scale was a vital part of the
way the world as we know it today was made. The Western world was built
on a top-down, competitive approach in pursuit of output. The imperative
to do more for less – boost productivity at less cost – permeates the whole
of life. However, the problem with a purely economic conception of a free
market society is that it puts profit before people; before well-being and
justice. The dominant narrative and strategic issues in global society are
about driving up productivity, standards in education, and competitiveness
to enable us to stay ahead in global markets. But can we come up with
a non-economic account of describing human value and worth? It is an
important question.

Introduction: Setting the Scene – Cameos of Yesterday 13
The market economy profoundly distorts human worth. It reduces what
you are and what you can do to what you are worth. Generating shareholder
value is not the only form of value. ‘How much am I worth?’ is the key question
in an economic system because it is a question that is more than economic: it
is social and intensely personal. It is also an on-going question, accentuated
even more so by the new technology in the fourth wave of industrialisation.
In the Faustian Facebook contract, we become a commodity by dint of saying
what we ‘like’, by revealing identity markers or personal information. An
incident will open the gates to law firms offering to represent us. We have been
sold for US $55. Or by selling personal data, a data broker can hawk a list of
‘rape sufferers’ to pharmaceutical companies at a cost of US $79 per name.
12
In the course of this book, we move through four phases. Firstly, we set
the scene and work out how we ended up with a consumer economy that
engendered social arrangements where what we are worth has come to
depend on quantity. As a concerned parent said to me in the context of the
materialism that lures young people (and indeed adults): ‘Society allows big
business to groom our children into being horrible little consumers which is
a life-long addiction. We have been manipulated into needing bigger, better,
faster. We have been duped!’
13
Secondly, we ponder what are the channels for the transmission and
shaping of personal worth in contemporary society? This is not just about
the economy in the classic sense; this is profoundly about power. Indeed, I
contend that economics has to reckon more than it has with the way power
is disbursed, as that is central to the context in which economic activity,
narrowly defined, operates. The usual measures of economic growth tell us
nothing about GDP is distributed or how whole swathes of young people are
left behind in finding a good job or a place to live.
Thirdly, we will look at the battlefield casualties of our economic and
social order, particularly as they shape the value and worth of human beings.
The rhetorical device we will use is one I am very familiar with: that of a
client. In effect, we put capitalism on the couch as we note the dysfunctional
ways that the world we have created undermines and often destroys the value
of the human.
Finally, we ask perhaps inevitable questions. Can we do things differ-
ently? What would it mean to widen our concept of value beyond the

14 A Question of Worth
bottom line or find alternatives to GDP that are better measures of
progress? Can we engender harmony between different forms of value in a
way that respects the need to bring money into an industry yet promotes
value in the social ecology and among those who participate in an enter-
prise? Can we promote quality in non-economic goods and not just
quantity? And crucially, can we address the issues of human devaluation
in society as a whole, seeing that as a space where enlightened self-interest
meets the economics of mutuality?
To ask questions about the link between economic value and human value
is to enter an arena of contradiction and ambiguity that reflects the human
situation. When the economic machine seizes up, it is humans that are
devalued and dumped. When official policies favour older, more established
workers, it is the young that are disaffected and excluded from the system.
When the tidal wave of automation threatens to wash up whole swathes of
workers on a lonely shore, what an oppressive waste of talent. Economic
activity, so central to human action, can provide contexts in which human
value and worth is nurtured so as to add value to society and the work of
organisations. Its opposite is also true. Capitalism undermines itself because
it perpetrates a category error: it takes no account of inner value precisely
because it conflates internalised worth with economic worth and therefore
commodifies the interior.
This book discusses the contradictions, conflicts and the power within
contemporary capitalism. For capitalism displays a reductionism that recog-
nises nothing but material interest and the maximisation of profit. Its
central drive is to feed off itself by the accumulation of yet more capital. As
the impetus towards ‘social capital’ attests, within the contemporary trend
towards colonisation of the whole of life by economic imperialism, social
relations are deemed to be physical and quantifiable in all but form. From
Bourdieu and Becker onwards, it has been custom to regard non-economic
forms of capital as equivalent to the economic. ‘Social capital’ has become
an analytical umbrella term. Treating human capabilities in volume terms,
however, leaves the subject vulnerable to economic downturn, to profit but
also loss.
As a Greek voter lamented after four years of recession, ‘if you lose your
self-esteem, you lose everything’.
14

1
How Did We Get Here?
Quantification as a Way of Life
‘Our minds soon lose control when things go all our way: when we enjoy
success, we end in disarray.’ – Ovid
1
‘However great our wealth may wax, it seems too small, still something lacks.’
– Horace
2
‘Increasingly, the logic and structure of the marketplace came to stand as a
shaping metaphor for society in general.’ – H. S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist
3
‘In what path of life can a man be found that will not animate his pursuit
from seeing the steam engine of Watt?’ – Arthur Young, Tours in England
and Wales
4
Our way of life represents a speed and noise culture for millions. It is so
fast that if there is no e-mail response within 24 hours, we wonder what is
wrong; for texts, the compression of time and expansion of expectation is
even more marked. Our culture is also profoundly dysfunctional. How did
we end up with social arrangements that pose such serious issues for the

16 A Question of Worth
value of those who created them and that place people in such a pressure-
cooker of achievement?
Our way of life too has created a carnivorous society in which we are
only useful if we are economically productive, where our output can best be
quantified in monetary terms. This has been attested by earning power and,
increasingly, by consumption. Late capitalism – a term I will use rather than
‘post-modernity’ – recruits its subjects from those who can keep up; who
can be productive through demonstrating an exchange value in the global
marketplace. Industrial, and then post-industrial society, constructed a
world based on restless output and constant productivity. Pursuing growth at
all costs has trapped us in a culture of performance and an insatiable demand
for more and yet more. We now need to remind ourselves of some history.
Quantification as social imperative and religion arose from a restless
urge to count. It was through numbering and measuring that the world
could be tamed and explained. Its arrogance lay in how human beings could
achieve mastery, or at least attempt to discover ‘how we’re doing’ as a form
of knowledge. The drive towards productivity and efficiency as a mode of
life is fairly recent. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Industrial
Revolution saw the greatest transformation humanity had ever witnessed the
conditions of life. From working the soil to working underground, from tools
to textiles, yields and output tripled and then tripled again. Powered by the
steam engine that brought iron and coal together, machines began to do the
work for which human hands had toiled so arduously before. The production
of everything 80-fold built the modern world. In the journey from field to
factory, how physical work was conducted changed forever.
Industrial transformation was based on an unprecedented leap forward
in output and productivity to achieve higher rates of output at less cost than
your competitors. If production costs – be they labour, land or transport
costs – were reduced, it gave a private enterprise an enormous advantage
over similar producers. Driving down unit costs meant that prices could be
lowered and customers tempted to buy that particular product. The rewards,
in the form of profits, could then be harvested.
The major question that economic history has to address is this: why and
how did Western Europe succeed in achieving something that no society
in history had ever done? That is, break from an agrarian past and move

How Did We Get Here? Quantification as a Way of Life 17
on to a different path; break through the negative feedback barriers that
confined people to poverty. The factory method and mindset dominated life
and labour through the first Industrial Revolution. Its astonishing output
and productivity was based on steam engines, iron and coal. In the second
Industrial Revolution, based on oil, cars and electricity, output and produc-
tivity rose to new heights. Everywhere, the demand was for more – more in
ever increasing varieties, shapes and sizes, ever increasing output, output,
output. The second wave went hand in hand with exponential growth in
consumer products, from nylons to toasters. The infrastructure was provided
by a platform of fossil fuels that not only powered the electricity, which
in turn powered the tools that made the vehicles that ran on oil, but also
powered the telecommunications that wired the economy together. This was
power at the end of the cable. National grids, both of power lines and roads,
became essential to industrial economies in the twentieth century. Thus, the
result of the economy stepping up many gears was a dramatic increase in
productivity and output.
The economic panic of 1907 in the United States highlighted that the
nation had been enjoying an average annual growth of 7 per cent since the
1890s.
5
At that rate, total industrial production was doubling every ten years.
Yields and, therefore, profits were enormous. Increasingly, outputs exceeded
inputs, the very essence of productivity. Supply was driven by the arrival of
a mass-consumer economy and vastly expanded appetite creating incessant
demand. Wealth creation required that modern economies invent things,
make things. That was spectacularly true of the Industrial Revolutions.
What a long way the world has travelled since those transformations
reshaped traditional ways of life! Economic liberalism, long regarded as the
motor of growth, required free movement of the factors of production. As
a consequence, global flows of capital and trade were raising people out of
poverty on ‘an industrial scale’. Thus, Japan and China, once they entered the
world capitalist economy in the 1950s, witnessed growth rates escalating on
average at an impressive 7 per cent per annum at the close of the century.
‘Speed is the new creed.’
We are seeing the equivalent of these industrial revolutions in China
today. Within ten years, millions went from working on farms to factories.
Urbanisation and economic expansion has been faster and on a far greater

18 A Question of Worth
scale in China than for any other society anywhere at any time. Unprecedented
transformation has resulted in changing expectations and wider horizons.
City life means young Chinese can make something of themselves. Dramatic
change has been especially marked in the position of women. No longer are
young women in rural areas trapped by traditional roles: social relationships
have been transformed.
In the late twentieth century, the world entered a new wave of expansion,
a third Industrial Revolution based on computerisation of routine tasks, satel-
lites and communications; and combined with containerisation, globalisation
and the internationalisation of finance. Going global heightened the need to
keep up in the race to the top; the alternative was a race to the bottom. In
the Latin America of the 1960s, for instance, capital and labour combined
to generate productivity approaching three-quarters of that of the United
States. Boom times well and truly marked the turn of the millennium. The
rapid industrialisation of China stimulated high demand for Latin American
commodities. Poverty fell and the middle classes bulged. At the time of writing,
however, there is considerable concern about stagnant economic growth
in Latin America. Lack of innovation, lack of infrastructure and increasing
violent crime has taken its toll on the region. Productivity has slumped to
barely half that of its giant neighbour to the north.
6
Globalisation has had its detractors. Across the world, citizens’ movements
fought the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and the multina-
tionals. The diversity of the human enterprise, critics argued, was swamped
by 200 transnational corporations which ran the world;
7
they were too
centralised, too undemocratic and authoritarian. Industrial society was
perceived to be a juggernaut rolling out from the West, sweeping everything
away before it. (Until the Tiger economies kicked in, it had seemed to be
an export of Western commodities, values and priorities.
8
) The result was a
brutality of exploitation and inequality arising from what V. Shiva has called
‘the walls that globalisation is building – walls of insecurity and hatred and
fear’.
9
New social movements arose in revolt against impersonal producers.
Eric Schmidt of Google suggests: ‘The pace of change is accelerating’.
10
In
a typical week in corporate America, 10 billion shares of Fortune 500-listed
companies will have changed hands in frenzied trading. Their bosses will
have been deluged with 750,000 incoming e-mails. Apple sells thousands of

How Did We Get Here? Quantification as a Way of Life 19
its products every other minute; customers download an Apple app every
millisecond. ‘We’re putting a premium on speed’, says the Chief Executive.
‘People ask, is there a silver bullet?’ comments the CEO of IBM. ‘The silver
bullet is speed.’
11
It is worth underlining that the economy today is in the throes of another
transformation. An entirely new economic world is being integrated into the
old, at the same time making it hugely more efficient while superseding and
transforming it.
Industrial transformation has been staggering. In the twentieth century,
humankind had taken to the air and learnt to fly like birds, travelling long
distances for both holidays and work. Jets shrank the planet forever. The
people made clothes from chemicals and played music by laser-beam. They
strode into space and placed their feet on the moon. Satellites and space
stations circled the globe. Metal reinforced towers defied the sky. Endless
tarmac tracks ran everywhere. Electronic communication became part of
the experience of millions, shaping their attitudes and opinions. Computer
power doubled every 18 months.
The last years of the twentieth century saw the economy in the throes of
another transformation. Planet earth became wired up in a fourth transfor-
mation that astounded those who lived even a generation before. An entirely
new economic world was becoming integrated into the old, making it hugely
more efficient at the same time as superseding and transforming it. The fourth
Industrial Revolution is based not on rail or road, but on the electronic super-
highway of the internet. This powerful infrastructure facilitates ‘big data’,
vast quantities of information stored and deployed. How far the new digital
economy is boosting productivity has been hotly debated and its failure – the
Solow paradox – particularly so. Everywhere were the mobile phones and
the microprocessors that now outnumbered humans two to one. Online
with e-mails and faxes, the people were now accessible anywhere, anytime.
Data became a commodity that could be bought and sold: the raw material
of the age. Computers started to talk to each other. The people had never
dreamt that one day they would stare at a screen to buy a house or a holiday,
books, food or an airline ticket. Every town and every person everywhere was
now networked with global intelligence. The people woke up to a futuristic
environment, full of robots and smart clothes. They had stumbled into a portal

20 A Question of Worth
of computer-generated film images from digital cameras. They blinked at the
challenge of gene therapy, artificial wombs, cyber sex, interactive technology
and virtual friends in a new world of nanotechnology, biotechnology and
info-technology spinning ten times faster every decade. It could transform
humanity every bit as much as printing and the Industrial Revolution. But it
also threatened to depersonalise, to offer sci-fi possibilities for exploitation on
an undreamt-of scale and to disenfranchise those in the developing countries
unable to play catch-up.
These are the economic and social arrangements we have made. They
come with a huge price tag.

2
The Differentiation of Worth –
Life in Layers
‘Labour should not be regarded merely as a commodity or article of
commerce but as human beings entitled to a reasonable standard of life.’ –
The foundation of the International Labour Organisation [ILO]
1
‘Sidaram Manji was shot, not because of what he had done but because of
what he was, a Dalit, formerly known as “untouchable”, living in a mud hut
on the edge of Mauri in Bihar, north-east India. He worked as a bonded
labourer in the field of his killers, Bhuminar landowners whose large brick
houses occupy the centre of the village. He drank from a different well, used
a different temple and never strayed over the invisible line segregating Dalits
from Bhuihars. His crime was to fish in a pond deemed out of bounds by
the landowning caste that controls the village.’ – The Guardian, 6 May 2014
2
‘Where I come from, it was all put-downs. You’ll never amount to anything,
it’s no good teaching you lot!’ remembers someone growing up in the East
End. You may have wanted to get out of here but when Mums and Grandmas
scrubbed steps or cleaned toilets and Dads went into the factory, what was
the point. Low expectation, low-self-worth comes from being told – “that’s all
you’re worth”. The emotional poverty was crushing. When I tried to brighten up
the community centre, people resisted at first. They had got used to the rubbish
surroundings because it was saying to them, “this is what we are – rubbish!”.’
3

24 A Question of Worth
The proposition being advanced here, in this book, is that social life is shaped
by and transmits value. Differentiation in society is replete with messages
about who are high-value people who are of lesser worth. Our experience is
radically affected by the value society places upon us.
The reality is that the social transmission of value and worth is far
more than a question of what individuals do for or to each other. Value
is communicated at a much broader level than conscious actions and
choices. It is embedded within society; individual practice can be read
off social practices on a far bigger scale than people and families. Human
worth is transmitted by deeply rooted social structures, or, more properly,
systems whirring away behind the scenes to quiet yet deadly effect. It is, for
the most part, systemic factors that explain racism or the power of other
‘isms’. Any analysis of social differentiations – such as class and gender or
indeed organisations – is enhanced by looking at them as systems, as fields.
Our understanding of the family is enhanced by assessing the dynamics
between its members and seeing it as a constellation. Analysis of human
violence is also served by regarding violent exchanges as taking place in
their own system; in other words, cultures of violence. Examine the reasons
why alarmingly high numbers of young people in global society find is
hard to get a job or decent housing and the problem is clearly systemic.
Think of it! The experience of gender violence or gender orientation, age,
disability, ethnicity or class reflects the silent and often lethal power of hidden
forces. In the American Deep South, vicious racism went hand in hand with
a supposedly genteel culture; both a product of a way of life shaped by ‘the
system’. Reflecting differing scales of worth as applied to differing groups
of humanity, ‘the system’ also transmitted and communicated those scales.
Human value is exercised in action, in the way in which people experience
life differently. It is not to be reduced to ‘attitudes’ or ‘prejudice’. Titanic forces
are showing up: forces that are not the work of a day or an hour.
‘The social constrains’, argued Émile Durkheim, the founding father of
sociology in the nineteenth century.
4
This was nowhere more true of class.
A traditional society constrained the kind of lives people lived and defined
their place in the world.

The Differentiation of Worth – Life in Layers 25
In these initial chapters, we are exploring the concept that class and other
ways of dividing up the world are profoundly moulded by whether or not
society places a high value or lower value on its subjects. Human devaluation
both transmits the inequalities of the world and helps to shape them. Social
pressures cluster those with similar subjective experience into categories and
fixed groups such as economic and occupational classes. In addition, social
evaluation brings with it a host of stigmas, labels and normative judgements
about who is standard issue and which type of person is of lesser worth.
What is crucial to note from the perspective of this book is that such social
valuing, inherently relative to other human subjects as communicating and
shaping lesser or higher worth, digs into ‘value in oneself’. When aroused,
this supplies energy for ‘the Protest’.
Durkheim watched as France entered into a political alliance with Tsarist
Russia in 1893. He lived to see the overthrow of the Romanov Dynasty
and the Russian Revolution in 1917. The social attitudes of the Russian
aristocracy undoubtedly contributed to the unrest that turned violent as
social revolution exploded.
‘The old government knew better how to deal with this peasant scum you
call the people’, one squire wrote to Prince Lvov, prime minister of Russia’s
Provisional Government of 1917. Yet Prince Lvov saw this as the revenge
of the serfs. ‘If only Russia had been blessed with a real landed aristocracy
like that in England, which had the human decency to treat the peasants as
people rather than dogs. Then perhaps things might have been different.’
5
Karl Marx, a German émigré and journalist who had arrived in Paris
in 1843, was the inspiration behind the politicised form that the social
upheaval took in Russia.
6
Marx wrestled with the problem of how to promote
a communist revolution in a country that was predominantly agrarian and
in which the urban working class was small. Nevertheless, it is clear from
contemporary Russian accounts that factory workers struggled with social
influences that wanted to place them only slightly higher up the social ladder
than the peasants. Some factory owners, unconstrained by legislation, could
order arbitrary and humiliating punishments or prescribe how workers should
dress at all times. This was resented as an affront to their personal dignity.
‘We are not even recognised as people but are considered as things that
can be thrown out at any moment […] outside Russia, even horses get to

26 A Question of Worth
rest. But our workers’ worth is worse than a horse’s’, commented O. Figes in
A People’s Tragedy.
7
When it came, the social explosion was a release of several pent-up
forces. Durkheim died a few days after the Bolsheviks seized power. By then,
however, Vladimir Lenin had declared war on privilege. Every village and
town, he said, ‘should be left to develop its own means of cleansing Russian
land of all vermin, of scoundrel fleas, the bedbug rich and so on’.
8
Durkheim developed a theory of social class based on the idea of the
division of labour in society. The normal state of affairs he saw as being
social solidarity – conflict arising from industrialisation was but a temporary
anomie. What constitutes social class today, however, has been more influ-
enced by Marx with his conflictual account of social divisions. In 1844, 14
years before Durkheim was born, a young Marx met Friedrich Engels, who
had just published his Condition of the Working Class in England. It was a
stirring essay on the dehumanising effects of industrialism. Engels famously
described housing in Manchester, the premier manufacturing city of the
world in his day, as resembling ‘cattle-sheds for human beings’.
9
Fast forward a hundred years to a boy from 1950s’ Huddersfield, heartland
of the British industrial working class and once characterised by overcrowded
streets, long hours in the mills and personal cycles of poverty amid the many
positive ways that communities knit together – through kinship and family
webs, friendships, clubs, unions and chapels. This boy is conscious of the
possibility of some social mobility, moving from a working-class home
through university into the junior ranks of management, but he is conscious,
too, that there the line ends:
There were two kinds of graduates that they took. There was me and my
kind. But there were others that joined at the same time – right regiment,
background, right car, knew how to handle a pair of guns and a fishing rod.
They got on like houses on fire. Up and up they went, just like that. They’ll be
on the board of managers now. But I felt I was being left behind in a corner,
just neglected. No matter what I did. No matter how good the ideas. Nothing
happened. After two-and-a-half years, they offered me a job that I could have
done when I was sixteen. That I could have done quite well at sixteen. Nothing
more. So I wasn’t going to start at the bottom again. Not after two-and-a-half
years. It was like playing snakes and ladders, only my kind being the kind that
comes down the snakes. I gave my notice in.
10

The Differentiation of Worth – Life in Layers 27
Many examples could be adduced to illustrate how dehumanising attitudes
reproduce class inequality. These statements speak of a valley where
depressive, devaluing factors have pushed the very worth and felt value of
people down. Social forces affect their being, not just social and relative
position. They are not merely external. What is needed to translate this
process into a whole class of people is systems thinking. Oppressive forces
act at the level of beyond the individual.
The things we do to prove our worth are as varied as the range and sum of
human activity. How many fish you catch is the measure of life. Measurable
results are a source of significance in contemporary landscapes, affecting
more and more women as well as men. The differentiation of worth is one
of three main channels through which value is disbursed in contemporary
society. These channels for the transmission of value are clearly related.
Occupation and income are intertwined even though occupation status and
what sort of people are high or low value bears little relation to the value of
the work they do. In particular, emotional labour (work that is about people
primarily) is less highly prized than making money. These become sources
of power; the ‘stay-at-home mum’ and the CEO are placed very differently
when it comes to power relations central to our current economic model.
In a recession, work-driven norms are problematic; they trigger demor-
alisation and loss of personal value that mirrors erosion of economic and
financial value. The lived experience of real people shows how much over the
years those sources of significance are evolving under social change. ‘I’d feel
guilty staying at home all day, as if I’m not contributing’, comments a client.
11

Work gives people a stake in the system though not everyone feels that is
particularly important to them.
Society is haunted by the inevitable question: platform for ‘how do you
do?’ but rather ‘what do you do?’ The accumulation of social capital, of status,
is a project of the first importance in the type of society we have created. It is
one where such quantification is of greater importance as a measure of value
than quality of time or relationship; efficiency is more highly charged and
valorised than effectiveness.
12
The differentiation of value shaped by occupation and power position
shapes the way economy and society is organised. Without espousing a
purely negative account of life and labour, hierarchies of importance suit

28 A Question of Worth
those who have the right skills, who look the part and are of the right age.
In parish life, one encounters those who have perfectly proper aspirations
to get on and get ahead as well as those who cannot keep up, those who are
weary of what used to be called the ‘rat race’ and those who are elderly. To
feel that one is locked out of the system or no longer valued is a very great
burden. Increasingly, it is young people the world over that the system does
not serve very well, who will take the difficult start to work experience and
work patterns through their adult lives. Allowing young people to find
pathways to work should be a primary function of an economy that works
for all.
Wealth has, of course, always been a marker of identity and status. The
change from traditional society to industrial society changed the equation
and opened up new forms of riches and professional occupation. Some
background is necessary to understand how the way value is transmitted in
society is closely connected with identity-driven power relations. The sharp
observer of early American democracy Alexis de Tocqueville thought that
with the division of labour in the industrialisation that was growing steadily
in the 1830s, the horizons of the workers were constrained. All they needed
to know was one thing – how to operate the machine. The mind of the
masters and factory owners, however, expanded with division of labour. The
master needed to know many things in order for the enterprise to flourish.
Bound up with power, such compression of knowledge or its contrast was
leading inexorably to new social polarisation.
13
Those who are valued depend therefore on what is valued. Value is a scale
of importance yet while the nouveau riche of de Tocqueville’s day could break
the social mould, class barriers were immensely strong. They still are. Class
differences affect the age people marry, how they will vote, health outcomes,
education and whether they attend church. The dice is loaded against many
children even before they start school. Their prospects are predictable
from the lives of their parents. The problem is to explain such differ-
ences without some idea of class. In post-structural sociology, essentialist
categories dissolve. Although a stable and fixed career trajectory pertains to
a smaller number of people, social mobility is still limited.
14
Despite one’s
place in society being of less and less concern, relative life chances do not
alter very much from one’s social background. Indeed, in the UK, the Social

The Differentiation of Worth – Life in Layers 29
Mobility and Child Poverty Commission’s annual reports demonstrate that
social mobility is on a downward slide.
15
An elderly lady recalls the way in which class imperatives operated in her
childhood and yet how, throughout her life, she was able to hold her head up
high. She truly believed: ‘I’m just as good as anyone’. Her mother was from a
middle-class family her father from the working class. Although her family
wasn’t that well off, her father was never quite accepted by her mother’s family. He
adored his daughter, however, and that fact surely must have formed the basis of
her positive outlook and confidence rather than her class or social background.
16
The UK was the first country to industrialise. It was then the first to
deindustrialise. In 1911, 40 per cent of the workforce was employed in
manufacturing. It is very different today, however. The contrast between
blue- or white-collar (manual) labour and non-manual labour is less
important than it used to be. Operating working industrial environments
can be as high-tech as any white-collar worker’s desk. It may, nevertheless,
be true that most work provides jobs that are ‘just jobs’. Higher-paid work is
more likely to impart identity to the worker. Technology has enabled a much
greater output to be generated by less human labour. The effect of this has
been to reduce the market value of low-skilled workers. These kinds of jobs
are disappearing in the West. More labour-intensive jobs require different
skills. The service sector, for example, requires skills such as empathy and
creativity, skills usually associated with women, which, in turn has resulted
in a rise in female participation in the workplace. Today, those who are left
out or left behind are often men with low skills or young people struggling
to get on the work or housing ladder. Economic dislocation is here to stay.
Children grow up hearing all kinds of messages about the types of people
who are valued most and those who do not enjoy the same social esteem as
their parents/peers. This is culturally transmitted through expectation and
attitudes. It emerges most clearly in encouraging or discouraging aspiration.
17

The gift of imagination – that is, a vision of what is possible in life – is a key
issue in social mobility. Those at the bottom of the social ladder are often
informed about their own inferiority. In the UK, for example, the education
system informed this: it could be read in the reality of being deposited in a
secondary modern school when the bright, replete with advantages, went
to the local grammar school. Now it can be read in the advertisements, the

30 A Question of Worth
celebrity culture and the cleverness of experts. The process of devaluation is
set to continue. According to a report on social mobility in the UK, seven
out of ten jobs created in the future will be professional or skilled jobs.
18

Thus poorly skilled men and women are trapped in poorly paid jobs and
experience the conditioning effects of devaluation that result in the poverty
of aspiration – the real enemy of personal progress.
Class has been such a major organising concept because in industrial
society, production, distribution and regulated work are vital. In the West,
there has been the landless labourer, the worker who was free to sell anywhere
what he or she had. Labour thus became a commodity. For Marx, it was the
experience of work that defined the relationship to the means of production.
Society did not arise from the individual; it was the other way round. The
German sociologist Max Weber disagreed with this viewpoint: it was the way
one found work and the rewards from it that were the important processes.
19

He believed that a person’s life chances would vary according to his/her access
to a wide range of sources of economic power. For some, it would be property,
for others their capital would add to more than the value of the property.
But status was also important to Weber. In his opinion, different individuals
or groups are viewed or valued differently and have greater privileges than
others. Many factors are thus important in determining the pecking order –
such as education, housing and occupational status. Social esteem or honour
is based on positive and negative privileges. ‘Classes, status groups and parties
are phenomena of distribution of power within a community’, he wrote.
20
The nature of work and society has changed a great deal since Marx criti-
cised the Industrial Revolution. Today, there is a hierarchy, not of social class
but rather of occupation. Whether people are workers or owners of factories
has been replaced by creating identities around lifestyle or job. Consumer
power defines social status. Weber argued that status, or ‘social honour’, also
defines where people are on the social ladder. Nurses receive a lower wage
than some workers and yet are very respected in society. Due to the influence
of Marx and Weber, analysis of exploitation and inequality has focused on
economic, power and status systems.
In a more recent theoretical analysis, the French writer Pierre Bourdieu
emphasises the concept of different forms of capital – economic, cultural,
social and symbolic – which together empower people in their struggle for

The Differentiation of Worth – Life in Layers 31
position. As a result, individuals occupy a space with those who also experi-
enced the same conditioning.
21
When it comes to the choice of occupation,
people often end up doing the most natural next step. This used to be going
down the mines because your father did. What Bourdieu is suggesting is
that it is not just economic relationships that shape our life chances. Cultural
capital also mediates the fundamental conception of the life we inherit,
giving people the ability to function on the abstract register, to be reflexive
and more imaginative. Usually, this comes about through education. Unless
class and cultural capital are addressed there, the status quo will remain.
Drawing on this conceptualisation, The Great British Survey, the largest
study of class conducted in the UK, was undertaken by the BBC in 2013
and involved more than 161,000 people. It suggested that although class
(and therefore value accretion) remains, people in the UK now fit into seven
social layers.
22
According to the survey, the traditional categories of working,
middle and upper class are outdated, fitting only 39 per cent of people. Class
has traditionally been defined by occupation, wealth and education, but the
research suggests that this is too simplistic. Instead, it suggests that class has
three dimensions – economic, social and cultural. It found a new model of
seven social classes ranging from the elite at the top to a ‘precariat’ – the poor,
precarious proletariat – at the bottom. The BBC Lab UK study measured
economic capital – income, savings, house value – and social capital – the
number and status of people someone knows. The study also measured cultural
capital, defined as the extent and nature of cultural interests and activities. The
cultural dimension had been left out of class analysis. Cultural interests and
consumption patterns should be central. The new classes are defined as:
• Elite – the most privileged group in the UK, distinct from the other
six classes through its wealth. This group has the highest levels of all
three capitals.
• Established middle class – the second wealthiest, scoring highly on
all three capitals. Also, the largest and most gregarious group, scoring
second highest for cultural capital.
• Technical middle class – a small, distinctive new class group, which is
prosperous, but scores low for social and cultural capital. Distinguished
by its social isolation and cultural apathy.

32 A Question of Worth
• New affluent workers – a young class group that is socially and
culturally active, with middling levels of economic capital.
• Traditional working class – scores low on all forms of capital, but
is not completely deprived. Its members have reasonably high house
values, explained by its members having the oldest average age of 66.
• Emergent service workers – a new, young, urban group that is
relatively poor but has high social and cultural capital.
While the elite group had been identified before, this is the first time it has
been placed within a wider analysis of the class structure, as it was normally
placed together with professionals and managers. At the opposite extreme,
the ‘precariat’, the poorest and most deprived grouping, were found to make
up 15 per cent of the population. The members of this group live precarious
lives in that income is uncertain; individuals often walk a financial tightrope.
These two groups at the extremes of the class system had been overlooked
previously in conventional approaches to class analysis, which had focused
on the middle and working classes. Studies were all about how much capital
had been accumulated, though capital should be redefined to include
cultural and social capital, as well as economic. The trope was, however, one
of quantification, of accumulation. What mattered was how much of this
prized commodity you had!
In the West, society witnessed a downgrading of manual labour, in contrast
to technical expertise and the downgrading of domestic labour, which is not
regarded as productive. Every society grades people according to social prestige
of occupations so that ‘the most important positions are most conscientiously
filled with the most qualified persons’.
23
Inequalities of outcome and poverty
are embedded in the system, repeated and recycled across the generations,
and are very difficult to shift. But class is also about hierarchy of value: where
you stand in the grand scheme of things; an attitude of mind fed by messages
of society about those who are more highly valued in contrast to ‘the distant
resigned eyes of many whom the world elected to dismiss as nobodies’.
24
No biography can be separated from the social and economic context from
which it arises. Devaluation is exclusionary. It operates through cultures that
establish a pecking order of who is superior, not just in social rank but also in
worth. A working-class boy in the parish grows up believing he is worth less

The Differentiation of Worth – Life in Layers 33
than others and, therefore, has less ambition as well as fewer options. This is
social conditioning. It translates into the expectations someone might have
had regarding the type of job or occupation to go for. For many, the middle-
class subject serves as a template, an aspirational standard against which
working-class people represent lack. Middle-class identifiers silently pass as
normal. A middle-class value system colonises life and aspiration: working-
class children are subjects in devaluing narratives of lack, seen as deficient,
not normal. This sustains a poverty of aspiration: a strong feature of poverty.
Anyone who is upwardly mobile must learn to read another culture. This is
the reality of subjective experience, for what it means to be ‘classed’. Class is
‘a way of growing, feeling, judging, taken out of the resources of generations
gone before’.
25
In parish life, it is clear that children grow up hearing all kinds of messages
both about who is valued and also about the kind of people who do not enjoy
social esteem. This is culturally transmitted through expectation and attitudes.
It emerges most clearly in encouraging aspiration.
26
This will become increas-
ingly problematic when, as noted earlier, seven out of ten jobs created in the
future will be professional jobs and many groups will be ‘the left behind.
27
It may be that to speak of status and hierarchy remains the best way of
negotiating meanings, as if to say, ‘I work; I am ordinary like everyone else’.
Nevertheless, in contemporary society, the stereotypes in many European
countries portray working-class people as lazy, slobs, a hated group, those
to be mocked. Though it is also increasingly true of young people, the white
working-class culture is the great ‘left behind’ in many political economies.
The public culture denigrates the working-class experience: ‘Chavs’ are
seen as dirty, idle and racist.
28
In late capitalism, even in societies that have
deindustrialised, the hierarchy of value continues to have force. Inherited
wealth and privilege may be far less valorised today but there are those that
are still treated as less worthy. They are subject to an ideology that we all get
what we deserve in life. What seems clear is that new layers, new forms of
class, will arise from the growing gap between the experience of many young
people in the global economy and the chasm opening up between the prolif-
eration of low-paid, insecure jobs and the higher – end skills that will thrive
as jobs are automated away. The Fourth Industrial Revolution will reshape
society as well as the workplace.

3
The Distribution of Worth – You Are
What You Earn
‘The value or worth of a man is, as of all other things, his price.’ – Thomas
Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 10
‘At a fundamental level, the model of globalization and deregulation has
blown up, and that’s what’s caused the current crisis. We’re now at the end of
that ideology.’ – Newsweek, 13 October 2008
1
How then does our type of society ascribe and transmit value to individuals
and groups? The central message of this book is that much social experience
and interpersonal life is shaped by the value placed upon us. In contem-
porary life, value is accorded to individuals and groups in a way that is
unrelated to inner value or ‘value-in-oneself’. What someone is worth is
awarded to social participants on the basis of the wage economy (economic
value), identity badges (status value such as ownership or appearance) or
identity boundaries (social value; being the right sort of person).
These fields are well documented in their own right. What I want to argue
is that each is a prime channel for the social transmission of value. A lack of
any one of these leads to a fall in the value of people or personal wealth, in

The Distribution of Worth – You Are What You Earn 35
the same way as the value of a bank account, property or shares is eroded.
Assigning value and worth to people and groups comes up against the inner
worth that they have (‘value-in-oneself’). In parish and client work, I became
intrigued by what happens when these external assessments of value meet an
internal sense of value.
Crucially, these three main channels communicate what people are
worth. Yet they are not neutral and passive channels. The distribution of
value through the wage economy and sources of wealth, its demonstration
through accumulation, consumerism or self-improvement projects, and
also the differentiation of value through different positioning in the
economic system also profoundly shape social experience. In other words,
these markers to external value are forms of power. They are routes by
which power is disbursed in contemporary life. Power and value are
inseparable.
The economy is far and away the main way that society ascribes value
and worth to people in the West. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote
about the power of the market to commodify labour and turn it into a thing
valued only by its price. What someone is worth is primarily a question of
wage rates and asset value. The workplace is the medium through which
value is transmitted. The relationship between the work we, and others,
do is problematic at the best of times but especially in times of economic
restriction. Economics is about value, how it is generated through work and
profits and how prices are determined that reflect what something is worth at
any one time. So what is the link between economic value and human value?
What do we mean by value?
As I write this chapter, a storm has just broken over Lord Freud, a
government minister in the UK Coalition. A descendant of Sigmund Freud,
he was recorded at a Conservative Party Conference saying that some people
with a disability were ‘not worth the minimum wage’. In his view, the appro-
priate remuneration for this group in the marketplace is much less than for
others. Wrapping the issue around the question of ‘worth’ is what has caused
the uproar that has followed. The term is evocative. Many have responded
strongly by defending the equal value of all workers; others have said that
while the word is confusing, there is still a need to differentiate the contri-
bution that different people make to a firm.
2

36 A Question of Worth
A few days after this media storm came a strike. ASDA shop-floor workers,
mostly women, were protesting against an issue of justice: they wanted to be
paid the same rate as warehousemen. It was, as their spokesperson said, a
matter of ‘value’. The shop-floor staff had the same value as warehousemen.
3

This is an account of the role that human value and worth plays in contem-
porary life. Arguably, by spilling over into non-market relations, the market
economy profoundly distorts human worth. It has reduced what you are and
what you can do to what you are ‘worth’. The longest downturn in the economy
since the Great Depression raises significant issues about the value of the
human.
The system of economic rewards is not, of course, a single giant machine
delivering wages and salaries that determine how much people are worth.
There are in reality countless small-scale systems (organisations) that deliver
formal value and worth as measured in terms of financial rewards. Such organ-
isations function within the large-scale system of the economy. Although it
is rumoured that external worth is not the arbiter of how much individuals
are valued and that a competitive market system is no virility test, interior
knowledge tells a different story. Wages and salaries generated by organisa-
tions deliver a relative value that is highly prized. That was constrained in the
crisis of capitalism following the economic crash of 2008. Average earnings
had barely risen by 2014, and for many, real wages were lower.
Economics usually concerns itself with the model of the rational person
acting to maximise the utility of decisions. The notion of marginality
assumes that supply and demand come together like scissors to fix the value
of anything. The process is neutral and takes no account of implicit bias. The
reality is that economic activity places people within a force field of power
relations. Subconscious influences are pervasive in economic decisions,
hence the rise of behavioural economics, which stresses it is about people
and their random actions. Power is disbursed through the economic system
and where people are positioned. Economics does not normally concern
itself with power relations but it needs to if we are to counteract human
devaluation.
I think of a trained and experienced chef, who I will name ‘Robbie’, who
is now compelled to work in the kitchens of a well-known chain of eating
and watering holes. The pay is minimum wage and ‘zero-hours’, which means

The Distribution of Worth – You Are What You Earn 37
Robbie has to accept whichever hours are required of him that week under
hot-house conditions. Literally, this is sweatshop labour. There is no appeal,
but as his new partner cannot seem to find better-paid work herself, together
the couple cannot make the budget stretch to cover the essentials, let alone
anything else.
4
For many in our communities, wage levels are set in such a way that
people are compelled to walk a financial tightrope. There is little left over,
leaving many only an unexpected bill away from increasing debt.
How much someone is worth invariably is tied up with what they are
worth in the marketplace. Yet remuneration cannot be the sole arbiter of
worth. If that were the case, how should we give an account of value that
involves low-paid, but ‘invaluable’ jobs? Would new forms of social status
and the remarkable capacity for self-reinvention be rooted in usual descrip-
tions of the economic system? How, too, could we give an account of other
forms of social grading and exam testing based on external markers to do
with identity?
Differentiation is inevitable, unless a society like that of Communist
China is built where doctors and dustmen are paid the same. ‘Equal value’
is a concept that was introduced in the UK Equal Pay Act by the Equal Pay
(Amendment) Regulations of 1983. Equal value was not defined, except to
say that jobs should be compared ‘under headings, such as effort, skill and
decision’. Such ‘headings’ (or ‘factors’) are used in job-evaluation systems
to analyse and compare jobs, to put them into a rank order based on the
demand of the work as the basis for grading and pay. This has been important
for employers with predominantly female workforces in comparing jobs and
deciding what the workers are worth.
The economy is a prime transmitter of worth. Arguably, the economy
distorts human value by being reductionist, taking life and labour to the level
of input–output relations. There is a massive problem with the way human
value is distributed in contemporary societies. What someone is worth is
primarily a question of wage rates and asset value. Economic activity is the site
and focus of participation in value. Salary structures, remuneration packages
and earnings potential distribute worth to millions. Participate, and one is
located somewhere on a status escalator. Do not find a job or be unemployed,
be the wrong gender or type of person, or just be old, and the ‘would be’ or

38 A Question of Worth
‘have been’ workers are thrown off the escalator; alienated from the prime
source of value in Western life. The workplace with its enormous variety of
organisations becomes the medium through which value is transmitted: to
paraphrase economist Adam Smith, an invisible hand that confers worth.
Whereas traditional society organised itself around its relationship to the land
(which gave rise to the polarisation of inherited wealth and power), in contem-
porary society, people have come to place enormous significance on occupation
as a marker of status. In most jobs that are not essentially vocational, worth
is distributed through what one is worth in the marketplace. That determines
relative income, and with it, both material possibilities and status in society.
More than ever, a monetary scale has become the measure of life and
merit. Industrialisation did not invent this. In his magnum opus The City of
God, Augustine argues that in the human city, people live and move there
in order to make a name for themselves, to obtain power and achievement
and recognition by others. By this, they then become somebody.
5
Following
on from the ideas of Augustine and also Thomas Aquinas, the basis of the
good society meant the sin of avarice. Merchants and traders were frowned
on, especially those who lent money at interest. The desire to improve social
status by getting richer was dangerous to society and soul. This negative view
– downright hostile when it came to ‘usury’ – dominated attitudes until the
growth of capitalism in the late medieval and the early modern period. It led
to the projection of such sin on to Jews (who were frowned on by mainstream
Christian society, anyway). The problem, as theologians warned, was that the
City of Man would became a place of exhaustion and oppression: exhaustion
because the pursuit of riches was frenetic; oppression because feverish effort
to gain recognition meant treading on others in the social hierarchy. This
is because under mercantilist thinking the amount of wealth is fixed: if one
wins, the other loses. If is a zero sum game.
Gradually, a more positive view of wealth creation and commerce
developed. Economic activity was no longer tainted and sinful. Max Weber
famously described it in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as
representing a positive stimulus and highly valorised attitude. That resolutely
‘this-worldly’ philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that there is nothing
wrong with the desire to get rich. It is only if pursued through illegitimate
means that earthly well-being should be condemned.
6
Over a century later,

The Distribution of Worth – You Are What You Earn 39
Adam Smith’s enquiry into how market economies worked was a positive
account of trade and commerce, to be unshackled so as to deliver ‘universal
opulence’ (read ‘prosperity’).
Against that backdrop, the transformation of life and work from the latter
end of the eighteenth century onwards has sharply accentuated the moneti-
sation of the world. It became widely accepted that individual achievement
should be rewarded. Today, the wide disparity in incomes is under the media
spotlight. Although all forms of inequality are widely discussed, it is the
sharp contrast between chief executive officers (CEOs) and their employees
that gets most attention. The wage disparity in a CEO being paid astronomi-
cally more than the non-managerial staff accentuates this protest. As often
observed, people don’t seem to mind someone being paid like a king as long
as they themselves are not paid like a peasant.
Without implying a miserabilist account of the contemporary West that
is one-sided, many in the parish are trapped in a low-wage and low-value
life. According to the report ‘Escape Plan’, the UK thinktank Resolution
Foundation found that while some in low-paid work were able to escape,
for three-quarters, pay progression was a mirage. While single parents, older
workers, those with disabilities or those working part-time may aspire to
better paid employment, they, in fact, often slip backwards.
7
Far too many
have migrated in and out of low-paid work instead of moving up the pay
ladder. Celebrity pay, meanwhile, is off the chart.
8
The question is whether the rich world or poor world can find the
political and economic will to create a fair society. Most Americans are worse
off than they were a generation ago. The benefits have gone to the top of the
pile. At the bottom, real wages are lower than they were 60 years ago. In real
terms, wages are falling in real terms while executive pay is untroubled by
economic crisis. People need money in their pockets and purses. Without
that, spending and hence demand cannot fuel an economy.
9
The Living
Wage movement, as we see it today, was not born in the UK. It arose from
community organising in Baltimore, Maryland and New York through Saul
Aulinsky’s ‘relational organising’ approach. New York City introduced a
Living Wage law in 1996. The idea is spreading, although it is not a recent
idea. Adam Smith stressed the need for employers to pay decent wages: ‘It
is but equity that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the

40 A Question of Worth
people should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be
themselves tolerably clothed and fed’.
10
The argument is that a fair day’s work deserves a fair day’s pay and that the
Living Wage makes sense for everybody. People paid fairly will spend more
in local businesses. Employers will get higher productivity, employee loyalty,
reduced sickness absence and fewer workplace disciplinary issues. The
welfare bill will come down. It may be an effective way of tackling poverty.
The Living Wage Commission’s 2014 ‘Working for Poverty’ report argued
that it is also about feeling valued. Many low-paying jobs, such as cleaning
and catering are outsourced to external service providers, which means staff
are employed by a different firm from that of those in the premises in which
they work and this can lead to staff getting a message that they are under-
valued and invisible. For example, one outsourced cleaner, working at John
Lewis in London’s Oxford Street, stated:
I work for John Lewis but I am not one of the partners. We, the cleaners, are
the invisibles in this beautiful palace. We are not the one with the John Lewis
badge and are not treated as a part of the family. We walk the same floors, use
the same lifts and canteen but are strangers in the place. Sometimes, we feel
like rats who are in hiding, do our job, not speak to anyone, don’t get asked
any questions or how my day was. Yet, we always make sure the place looks
spotless and fresh.
11
In the UK, the median full-time salary in 2010–11 was £26,200 per year, but
someone working full time for the minimum wage would only earn around
£11,000, while the top 10 per cent earned over £52,600.
12
As a supermarket
worker, paid £6.70 an hour, reported to the Living Wage Commission:
I do not smoke or drink because I try to keep a car on the road so that I can
visit my brother in a care home seven miles from my home. I also pay around
80 per cent of my income on rent, food, Council Tax, utilities, telephone,
broadband and petrol. I take a holiday every two years for a week to visit
family. It does not leave very much to save or to replace household goods
when they fail.
13
How hard people work: what pressure they are under. The whip of achievement
drives millions forward on the treadmill. Yet there is huge concern as I write

The Distribution of Worth – You Are What You Earn 41
about the productivity puzzle. In the US, workers’ output fell by 3 per cent
between the last quarter of 2014 and the first quarter of 2015. Figures from
the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) did show, however, that US produc-
tivity had nevertheless risen by 11 per cent since the financial crash began
in 2007. This was very good going compared with the US’s European peers.
14

In the UK, the need to boost productivity and get more and more output
per hour has become a fierce imperative. The only answer, seemingly, to the
lagging productivity gap is to work more people for longer hours to keep up.
In late capitalist society, from China to Chinatown, workers live relentless
lives. It is not only in pursuit of financial status that people are working longer
hours – 50 or 60 hours a week is not uncommon (paradoxically the same
work hours as in the early Industrial Revolution).
15
The imperative to earn is
in order to consume. Status has meant acquiring ‘status goods’. Increasingly,
it is consumer power that has defined social status. Yet participation in the
labour market is not just about having money to spend, it has become a prime
source of significance and marker of competence for millions of women who
want economic opportunities. The wage economy is, therefore, central to the
social transmission of value and worth. According to a groundbreaking study
by the World Bank,
16
involving visits to 15,000 classrooms, Latin American
schools are mired in educational failure. A strong reason for this is that large
numbers of teachers are recruited from school-leavers who are less bright,
trained badly and also crucially paid anywhere between 10 per cent and 50
per cent less than other professionals. Salary levels indicate their status.
Contrast this with the news coming through, as I write this, that the
CEO of Tesco has been fired and retired on account of this international
supermarket chain under-performing. Smaller discount chain rivals have
been undercutting it at one end of the market, while quality stores have been
nibbling into profits at the other end. The outcome has been that the unique
value-for-money and selling proposition Tesco has to offer is now being
sharply questioned. On hearing of the news, share values began to recover,
the market reaction being that Tesco could now pull its socks up.
17
Economics is about value, how it is generated through work and profits
and how prices are determined that reflect what something is worth at any
one time. I am arguing that there is a different form of value – ‘value-in-
oneself’ – the drive for which is fundamental to social processes. So it is

42 A Question of Worth
worth recalling that there is a value theory relating to goods and services to
explain how their price is determined through the wage and salary system.
Marx did not originate the idea of a labour theory of value. It was given
classic form by Adam Smith, the prophet of capitalism, as he sought to
explain how the price of goods and services is determined:
The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who
wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What everything is
really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it
or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to
himself, and which it can impose upon other people.
18
Behind the value of a good, the economist argued, is the human labour in
producing it:
The value of any commodity, […] to the person who possesses it, and who
means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commod-
ities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or
command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of
all commodities.
19
It was David Ricardo who formulated the classic statement of the link
between economic value and the value of the labour involved. ‘The value
of a commodity, or the quantity of any other commodity for which it will
exchange, depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for
its production, and not as the greater or less compensation which is paid for
that labour.’
20
These classical economists saw prices and value as reflecting primarily
the costs of production. According to H. Davenport, ‘The scientific devel-
opment of economic theory began as an attempt to solve the value problem’.
21

Marx defined the value of the commodity in terms of labour. Agreeing that
products are exchanged in the marketplace roughly in line with the labour
costs of producing them, he argued that value is the ‘socially necessary
abstract labour’ embodied in a commodity. The usual outline of factors of
production – capital, land and labour – were subsumed into labour. It is
human capital alone that creates all the value and therefore the source of
profit incentives. Human value is without qualification, an intrinsic worth

The Distribution of Worth – You Are What You Earn 43
independent of how much you are worth on the market.
22
It is socially
unacceptable for the rich to derive income from the ownership of property.
It is equally undesirable for factory owners to cream off the ‘surplus value’
produced by the workers above and beyond the wages they receive. Surplus
value is the amount that the factory owners pocketed. In the Marxist view of
the world, this was a route that leads to the exploitation and impoverishment
of the working classes. Communism played on the desire for justice as well
as a desire for revenge.
23
The great theme of Das Kapital, Marx’s magnum opus, was showing how
capitalism works. It was, however, a conflation of apparent scientific analysis
with angry polemic. Because human labour was the primary source of value
– ‘in the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread’ – profit was surplus value.
The difference between the amount at which the capitalist sold goods and the
amount he paid his workers meant that exploitation was fundamental to the
system. All the profits should return to the workers. Investment and capital
represented historic exploitation of the labours of previous generations. It
was, therefore, unjust that there should be returns for the investment said to
bring money into an industry. Indeed supervision by management fell under
the same hammer. In feudal societies it had been abundantly clear. The time
the serf worked for the lord was laid down.
In the new industrial system, the time that labourers spent working for
their employers was far more hidden. The worker sells his bodily powers
to the capitalist with the result that human work was now a commodity. It
was in the interest of the factory owner to drive the price of people down
to the lowest possible subsistence level in order to keep the proletariat
barely surviving so that they and their children could remain workers in
the capitalist system. Marx did recognise that the explosion of productivity
created potential for a society in which work could become more creative.
Capitalism was constantly changing and indeed reproducing itself as it
spread across the world. As real wages fell in line with the imperative to keep
profits up, capitalism was acting as its own gravedigger.
Marx was wrong about that. Wages were rising in the very years that Das
Kapital was being written and yet the average number of hours being worked
was falling. Perhaps he did have a point though that the short-term effects
of the factory system led not just to misery, but also to the breakdown of the

44 A Question of Worth
traditional family. Not only was the worker enslaved, as women and children,
too, were dragged into the production process. Yet as they went out to work,
women would have the ability to earn money and, paradoxically, this would
soften industrialisation; the workplace would become more feminised.
24
At first blush, it seems apparent that things are worth what they cost to
make them. Yet though superficially attractive, the labour theory of value
is problematic. It is by no means the case that all the effort of our labours
results in something that can be traded. Also, as Adam Smith observed,
there are many natural objects that have not had labour expended on them.
Gemstones and berries have an economic value in their natural, un-worked
state. Marx failed to take into account that consumer demand changes
over time and within time. Wine that ferments over years is more valuable
than wine that is newly made. The labour theory of value fails for another
reason. Reforms in the labour market are often necessary. It also fails the
test of what economists call time preference. Consumer demand is usually
for items that are readily purchasable here and now rather than for those
that involve waiting. If an item is sold on later, a worker cannot usually be
expected to wait until he or she gets paid. A labour theory of value may
have been valid for the first Industrial Revolution when machines began
to do the work. The second wave of industrialisation early in the twentieth
century when assembly lines took over meant that industries began to be
less labour-intensive. Wage costs are growing less and less important because
labour represents a small part of making and selling things. In 2012, a US
$499 first-generation iPad included only about US $33 of labour costs.
25

As manufacturing goes digital, it will change how goods are made and,
therefore, the human element. Few items now reflect the cost of components
and the labour that goes into their manufacture; they reflect rather, the price
that consumers are prepared to pay.
The economic way of valuing human beings is inherently reductionist.
Increasingly in contemporary society, the nature of your job is less important
than what money you have. Arguably, we have become more divided by
money. The demand for ‘more, more and still more’ is shrill. Position in
society is increasingly defined by it. Keeping up at all costs is vital for
competing in the global race.
The relationship between the work we and others do, or do not do, is

The Distribution of Worth – You Are What You Earn 45
problematic at the best of times but especially so in times of economic
restriction. Society is haunted by the inevitable question, ‘What do you
DO?’ – not ‘who are you?’ but ‘what are you?’ The translation of ‘what?’ into
‘who?’ constitutes a pernicious category error. Continuous and, at times,
harsh evaluations are made according to one’s occupation or by those in close
relationship to the subject. A greater proportion of the population is now
retired, unemployed or unemployable. Most would agree that these all deserve
to be valued still, their lives given ‘worth’. In modern industrial societies, with
their continuing hierarchy of individual value, the economy is the prime arena
through which worth and value is assigned to participants. ‘You are a street
cleaner, this is all you are worth’
26
is reflected in wages. Put simply, in a society
where income is the primary measure of worth, those on higher incomes are
more important than those on lower. Those who are off the workplace radar,
such as the unemployed, or those who pursue other important goals – such as
bringing up children or care for the elderly – have less social influence and self-
worth precisely because they are not earning. Where that leaves those who do
not put money in the bank to show for their labours is hugely problematic in
late capitalism. Those who fail are relegated to the margins or choose to opt out.
As one American mother expressed it in an interview in Parents Magazine:
Before I quit teaching to stay at home with my first baby, I thought that the
hardest part of leaving my job would be losing the money. I was wrong […]
the real problem with not earning a paycheck, I found, was keeping up with
my self-esteem. If I am not earning a salary, what am I worth?
27

4
The Demonstration of Worth –
You Are What You Own
‘I have tried long-term relationships but I have got a fast moving internal
mechanism. There is a tyranny of choices, endless choices; you can buy
washing machines, cars, jeans – why not consume people in the same way?’
– Russell Brand
1
‘Economists attempt to attach a monetary value to non-market goods by
looking at the impact that these things have on utility. Utility, in the broadest
sense, refers to the satisfaction that a person gets from consumption of a
good, or to the change in their welfare or wellbeing.’ – HM Treasury (2011)
Green Book
2
The power lies in society with those who dictate the terms of who or what
is valued.
If the distribution of worth in our type of society is shaped by wealth
and how much you earn, the differentiation of value in our type of society
is rooted in power relations. The relationship between those who own and
distribute wealth and those on the receiving end is one of power and pecking
order. Those who pay the piper call the tune. This is not only a question of

The Demonstration of Worth – You Are What You Own 47
ownership and access to the means of production as against the hapless
workers. Such Marxist dualism did not fit the twentieth century, let alone the
twenty-first. Those who call the tune are just as likely to be corporate adver-
tisers as corporate multinationals. Those who wield enormous influence
are not so much producers who attempt to satisfy demand, politicians who
respond to events or media people who report on them or even educators
who inform learners later about what is happening. The wielders of power
are the persuaders, those who shape demand. Power equals the production
of images. Any analysis of power relations involved between bosses and staff
(the twentieth-century equivalent of factory owners and workers) needs to be
supplemented with grasping the power relations involved with consumerism.
In turn, an analysis of power relations needs to be fitted into economics as
a whole. This would turn and return economics into the discipline of political
economy from which it sprang.
Now we are to consider the demonstration of value through accumulation
of high value consumer goods combined with self-improvement projects.
These channels run deep into our psyche. The social transmission of value
is out of step with the position people often take up in response, which
reacts from a sense of reflexive inner value. In defining human worth exter-
nally, society perpetrates a category error; an error that is played out with
deafening tones in parish life in work with families.
Today, in the drive towards expansion and productivity at all costs, every-
thing can be thrown away; everything is disposable. As Polish sociologist
Zygmunt Bauman observed, the 2011 riots in England provided a window on
disaffected consumers. Living and working in distressed urban communities
that can be characterised by greed and boredom, I found it disturbing how
many of life’s possibilities were no longer summed up in no longer the ‘doggie
in the window that costs half a crown‘ but rather by ‘that pair of trainers in
the window!’
3
Arguably, the acquisition of brands is about the acquisition of value.
Consumer culture is pedagogical. It teaches young people that to achieve
status, you must own. The catch is that to own, you need money. Acquisition
of things becomes the means to acquiring recognition and respect (read
value) through status-enhancing goods. The latest brand or gadget increas-
ingly defines identity: their lack conveys relative humiliation. The only way

48 A Question of Worth
frustrated young consumers can respect themselves is by buying some latest-
name brand clothes and sophisticated electronic equipment. It confers social
acceptance. Traditionally, in many working- and lower-middle class families,
the impact of relative poverty was to generate thrift. Today, in a society
characterised by bewildering consumerism, a culture of ‘feeding on demand’
is set up: ‘I want it and I want it now …’
To invoke the ideas of economic historian R. H. Tawney, has the ‘Acquisitive
Society’ spawned acquisitiveness? Where value and worth are in things you
possess, the result is inevitably social insecurity among those who feel that
they lack. The much-publicised use of Blackberries in the English riots
showed that technology was undoubtedly a factor in the emergent consum-
erism that shapes urban social ecology. As the latest toys and tools become
status symbols, the bewildering speed of new technology’s rapidly evolving
offerings is inseparable from consumer culture. There is, moreover, a strong
link between the way that relative poverty is devaluing and the impact of
insecure parenting. The impact of inconsistent parenting style is made worse if
everyone around you seems to be enjoying the consumer party. The pressures
of modern society start early. Children are socialised into consumerist culture
from which they become alienated and disaffected; the sexualisation and
commercialisation of the world around them bites them to the core.
The industrial transformation of the world has not just been about supply.
As ever, supply creates its own demand. A consumer revolution had been
slowly gathering pace even before the celebrated ‘take-off into sustained
growth’ of the Industrial Revolution in the 1780s, with huge growth in the
quantity and variety of manufactured goods available for purchase. Historians
now recognise the impact of this cultural transformation as signifying
immense development in trade, in manufacturing and in the public culture
of the marketplace.
4
Commercial transformation was powered by consumer
goods pouring in great quantities and varieties from shops, markets and by
a new breed of salesmen, anxious to promote their wares. The print trade
was part of the infrastructure of expansion, creating a means of adver-
tisement that predated the subsequent rise of mass-circulation magazines
and newspapers.
5
Seeds were sown for the rise of industrial capitalism.
That is a debate for economic historians. The results of consumerism go far
beyond the imaginative capacities of those who lined up to cheer or lament

The Demonstration of Worth – You Are What You Own 49
its rise and rise 250 years ago. Before the advent of mass-consumer economy,
the French writer Voltaire had argued that economic growth meant an
increase in material well-being and, with it, the possibility of consumption.
Luxury goods were available to a wider group of people. Material prosperity,
said Voltaire, was the basis for higher civilisation. Tastes changed. What
previous generations, influenced by moralists and Christians, had regarded
as frivolous, his contemporaries now saw as necessities. The humble scissors,
once seen as fit for ‘dandies and squanderers’, were becoming commonplace.
6

‘Luxury’ had been a pejorative term; fulfilling material satisfactions was at the
expense of the common good. Abstinence and austerity had been promoted
as Christian virtues or as the outcome of civic moralistic traditions. That
was changing fast, however, as pursuing economic growth brought increased
opportunity for material well-being and therefore consumption. Voltaire was
a standard-bearer for the new Enlightenment culture in which prosperity
was to be welcomed: the ‘Worldling’ celebrated.
7
Voltaire’s critic, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, contended this. Long before
advertising became the province of the persuaders, he argued that wants
and desires were being needlessly stirred up. Humanity was being driven by
infinite yearnings for things that cannot be realised. Yet, paradoxically, we
never get enough for that which we crave most, the esteem and recognition
of others. The result was that material goods and wealth are not inherently
satisfying and end up deflating us.
How greatly things have moved on from the high noon of the
Enlightenment. It took a long time for attitudes to change towards the
accumulation of wealth and its association with greed and extravagance. The
self-restraint and thrift that characterised much of Victorian society now
had serious drawbacks. As a big idea, ‘consumption’ came to lose previous
images of ‘using up’ and therefore wasteful destruction. Henceforth, satis-
fying human needs and desires was positive; it was socially acceptable. Now
that industries had the capacity for mass production, a key question arose. ‘If
everyone deferred gratification, who would buy the new products?’
8
It was
paramount that people buy. Economist Thorstein Veblen described the new
mood as ‘conspicuous consumption’.
9
On the back of a considerable expansion of credit and purchase by
instalments, the 1920s were widely seen as embedding consumption firmly

50 A Question of Worth
within the American Dream. The consumer craze took hold. ‘The American
citizen’s first importance to his country is no longer that of citizen but that
of consumer.’
10
Twentieth-century consumerism aimed at nothing less than
a massive re-programming of its eager followers. The car industry was in the
forefront of this revolution. Rather than turn out one model-T Ford, why
not segment the market and entice continuous selling with a new car every
year, organised around the production of artificial dissatisfaction? Exterior
elements such as colour or trim would seal the deal and personalise the
market, as well as segment it. The consumption craze then spread to products
in the home. Then it went global.
The phenomenon of built-in obsolescence lay at the heart of the massive
expansion of consumerism. Products were deliberately made to break; the
new became obsolete quickly. Everything was disposable, everything a life-
style choice. As the Marxist critic Marcuse argued, society played with false
needs; creating needs and superimposing them through advertising. People
desire new products. That is not freedom. It is merely the ability to choose
one item rather than another.
11
Marcuse’s one-time student Daniel Bell presciently observed that there
were ‘Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism’. In its organisation, the indus-
trial corporation required serious self-restraint. To sell its products, however,
what was needed were consumers who would ‘buy and buy now’. Deferred
gratification had been necessary to early capitalism when the cultural
ideal of being frugal was dominant. That had changed in a society where
a continuous production of new wants and new means of satisfying those
wants was the order of the day in the social order of shopping.
12
Driving the transformation of capitalist products from luxury to necessity
was the power of advertisers, who quickly became one of the most influ-
ential voices in Western society. Consumers were now calling the tune and
paying the piper. This was because effective demand was central to economic
growth. To entice people to buy the products of their ingenuity that flooded
the markets, the producers enlisted the help of advertisers, Vance Packard’s
‘Persuaders’. The persuaders formed a group of three Marketeers: swash-
bucklers all amid heroic scenes of print, film and electronic media. And
so advertisements acquired sophistication amid the flickering images of
television. All this came at a price. Consumers reacted against a lack of faces

The Demonstration of Worth – You Are What You Own 51
in remote, impersonal forces. Even through a Marxist lens, producers were
by no means one group. Fiercely competitive among themselves, they had to
sink or swim in a larger pool. Everywhere, local producers were faced with
the tidal wave of global markets.
This matters profoundly. UNICEF UK commissioned an ethnographic
study to explore some of the reasons why levels of well-being were so low
in children in the UK compared with those in Spain and Sweden. The result
of a research project using accepted canons of qualitative methodology
13

showed that children felt trapped in a ‘materialistic culture’ and did not
have enough time with their families. This research paid particular attention
to the role of materialism and inequality in children’s well-being. There is
a growing consensus in the literature that these concepts are inextricably
linked: materialism is a cause, as well as an effect, of negative well-being, and
countries that have higher levels of inequality are known to score lower on
subjective well-being indicators.
The 2011 UNICEF UK study’s methodology was underpinned by
Ecological Systems Theory,
14
a Child Rights Social Ecology perspective that
sees child development as part of a broader social, cultural, economic and
political set of systems. Materialism had hitherto been conceptualised as
a psychological construct and most notably as a personality trait or, more
recently, as a component of an individual’s value-set. It had rarely been studied
as a social phenomenon. Underpinning the research with the Child Rights
Social Ecology model allowed the researchers to take a fresh contextual look
at the interplay between materialism, inequality and well-being.
The evidence suggested that materialism appears to be problematic for
adults as well as children. While technology and clothes brands were actively
coveted, for the majority of the eight- to thirteen-year-olds across the three
countries, new toys, fashion items and gadgets were not central to their well-
being. Rather than wanting to acquire things for their own sake, material
objects and consumer goods tended to fulfil a range of purposes in children’s
lives: utilitarian, symbolic and social. There is a symbolic use of brands that
confers either superior status or the avoidance of bullying that is much more
problematic than being merely functional.
15
The role of consumer goods in
the lives of children is therefore complex and not easily reduced to a single
notion of greed or acquisitiveness.
16
However, while most children agreed

52 A Question of Worth
that family time is more important than consumer goods, within UK homes
there seemed to be a compulsion on the part of some parents to continually
buy new things both for themselves and their children. British parents were
often buying their children status brands believing that they were protecting
them from the kind of bullying they experienced in their own childhood.
17

In this way, ‘things’ stand as proxy for personal value, a deterrent against its
erosion.
Consumption undoubtedly represents a ‘feel-good factor’. The allure of
touching and trying something on, indeed the very atmosphere of shopping,
is a motivator. But conspicuous consumption feeds a representation of a
valuable self that has been sold to us by the advertisers. The image-makers
convince because the products will convey. That mysterious ‘something
about us’ feeds identity construction, so our observers will realise we are
people of status, wealth, power or other perceived goods, the ‘coolness’ and
the balm. Like nearly all forms of social valuing, this is gendered. Though it
implicates more women than men, the new social order of shopping, the new
social order of shopping recruits its subjects to achieve the demonstration of
worth. It is all part of the hedonistic individualism that seems to characterise
our times. If you have not got this or that, you feel a failure. It is pseudo-
status. Contentment is seen as a weakness. Our experiences, our tastes and
our purchases are not just arbitrary. They reflect who we are and our capacity
to make new selves.
18
Self-improvement Projects
Consumer culture is not just accumulation of status goods. Self-improvement
projects are now all the rage. Society’s obsession with the shape and size of
women’s bodies has helped shape a generation of anorexics and people
suffering from other eating disorders. Being thin has come to signify qualities
of character such as self-control and strength as well as beauty, success and
happiness. Anorexia is about control; using a strict attitude to weight is a
defence, arguably the only one a girl has, against chaos. Rather than helping
anorexics to accept and befriend their bodies, the hospital may view it as
a problem, as an enemy. UK clinical psychologist and critic of biomedical
psychiatry Lucy Johnstone argues that,

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oiled butter, and put the sweetbreads into a moderately-heated
oven, and let them bake for nearly ¾ hour. Make 3 pieces of toast;
place the sweetbreads on the toast, and pour round, but not over
them, a good brown gravy. Time.—To soak 1 hour, to be boiled 10
minutes, baked 40 minutes. Average cost, 1s. to 5s. Sufficient for an
entrée. Seasonable.—In full season from May to August.
SWEETBREADS.
SWEETBREADS, Fried (à la Maître d’Hôtel), an
Entrée.
Ingredients.—3 sweetbreads, egg and bread-crumbs, ¼ lb. of
butter, salt and pepper to taste, rather more than ½ pint of maître-
d’hôtel sauce. Mode.—Soak the sweetbreads in warm water for an
hour; then boil them for 10 minutes; cut them in slices, egg and
bread-crumb them, season with pepper and salt, and put them into
a frying-pan, with the above proportion of butter. Keep turning them
until done, which will be in about 10 minutes; dish them, and pour
over them a maître-d’hôtel sauce. The dish may be garnished with
slices of cut lemon. Time.—To soak 1 hour, to be boiled 10 minutes,
to be fried about 10 minutes. Average cost, 1s. to 5s., according to
the season. Sufficient for an entrée. Seasonable.—In full season
from May to August.
Note.—The egg and bread-crumb may be omitted, and the slices
of sweetbread dredged with a little flour instead, and a good gravy
may be substituted for the maître-d’hôtel sauce. This is a very
simple method of dressing them.
SWEETBREADS, Stewed (an Entrée).

Ingredients.—3 sweetbreads, 1 pint of white stock, thickening of
butter and flour, 6 tablespoonfuls of cream, 1 tablespoonful of
lemon-juice, 1 blade of pounded mace, white pepper and salt to
taste. Mode.—Soak the sweetbreads in warm water for 1 hour, and
boil them for 10 minutes; take them out, put them into cold water
for a few minutes; lay them in a stewpan with the stock, and simmer
them gently for rather more than ½ hour. Dish them; thicken the
gravy with a little butter and flour; let it boil up, add the remaining
ingredients, allow the sauce to get quite hot, but not boil, and pour
it over the sweetbreads. Time.—To soak 1 hour, to be boiled 10
minutes, stewed rather more than ½ hour. Average cost, from 1s. to
5s., according to the season. Sufficient for an entrée. Seasonable.—
In full season from May to August.
Note.—A few mushrooms added to this dish, and stewed with the
sweetbreads, will be found an improvement.
SWEETBREADS, Lambs’, larded, and Asparagus
(an Entrée).
Ingredients.—2 or 3 sweetbreads, ½ pint of veal stock, white
pepper and salt to taste, a small bunch of green onions, 1 blade of
pounded mace, thickening of butter and flour, 2 eggs, nearly ½ pint
of cream, 1 teaspoonful of minced parsley, a very little grated
nutmeg. Mode.—Soak the sweetbreads in lukewarm water, and put
them into a saucepan with sufficient boiling water to cover them,
and let them simmer for 10 minutes; then take them out and put
them into cold water. Now lard them, lay them in a stewpan, add the
stock, seasoning, onions, mace, and a thickening of butter and flour,
and stew gently for ¼ hour or 20 minutes. Beat up the egg with the
cream, to which add the minced parsley and a very little grated
nutmeg. Put this to the other ingredients; stir it well till quite hot,
but do not let it boil after the cream is added, or it will curdle. Have
ready some asparagus-tops, boiled; add these to the sweetbreads,
and serve. Time.—Altogether ½ hour. Average cost, 2s. 6d. to 3s.

6d. each. Sufficient.—3 sweetbreads for 1 entrée. Seasonable from
Easter to Michaelmas.
SWEETBREADS, another Way to Dress (an
Entrée).
Ingredients.—Sweetbreads, egg and bread-crumbs, ½ pint of
gravy, ½ glass of sherry. Mode.—Soak the sweetbreads in water for
an hour, and throw them into boiling water to render them firm. Let
them stew gently for about ¼ hour, take them out and put them
into a cloth to drain all the water from them. Brush them over with
egg, sprinkle them with bread-crumbs, and either brown them in the
oven or before the fire. Have ready the above quantity of gravy, to
which add ½ glass of sherry; dish the sweetbreads, pour the gravy
under them, and garnish with water-cresses. Time.—Rather more
than ½ hour. Average cost, 2s. 6d. to 3s. 6d. each. Sufficient—3
sweetbreads for 1 entrée. Seasonable, from Easter to Michaelmas.
SYLLABUB.
Ingredients.—1 pint of sherry or white wine, ½ grated nutmeg,
sugar to taste, 1½ pint of milk. Mode.—Put the wine into a bowl,
with the grated nutmeg and plenty of pounded sugar, and milk into it
the above proportion of milk from the cow. Clouted cream may be
laid on the top, with pounded cinnamon or nutmeg and sugar; and a
little brandy may be added to the wine before the milk is put in. In
some counties, cider is substituted for the wine: when this is used,
brandy must always be added. Warm milk may be poured on from a
spouted jug or teapot; but it must be held very high. Average cost,
2s. Sufficient for 5 or 6 persons. Seasonable at any time.
SYLLABUBS, Whipped.
Ingredients.—½ pint of cream, ¼ pint of sherry, half that
quantity of brandy, the juice of ½ lemon, a little grated nutmeg, 3

oz. of pounded sugar, whipped cream the same as for trifle. Mode.—
Mix all the ingredients together, put the syllabub into glasses, and
over the top of them heap a little whipped cream, made in the same
manner as for trifle. Solid syllabub is made by whisking or milling the
mixture to a stiff froth, and putting it in the glasses, without the
whipped cream at the top. Average cost, 1s. 8d. Sufficient to fill 8 or
9 glasses. Seasonable at any time.
SYRUP for Jellies, to Clarify.
Ingredients.—To every quart of water allow 2 lbs. of loaf sugar;
the white of 1 egg. Mode.—Put the sugar and water into a stewpan;
set it on the fire, and, when the sugar is dissolved, add the white of
the egg, whipped up with a little water. Whisk the whole well
together, and simmer very gently until it has thrown up all the scum.
Take this off as it rises, strain the syrup through a fine sieve or cloth
into a basin, and keep it for use.
TAPIOCA PUDDING.
Ingredients.—3 oz. of tapioca, 1 quart of milk, 2 oz. of butter, ¼
lb. of sugar, 4 eggs, flavouring of vanilla, grated lemon-rind, or bitter
almonds. Mode.—Wash the tapioca, and let it stew gently in the milk
by the side of the fire for ¼ hour, occasionally stirring it; then let it
cool a little; mix with it the butter, sugar, and eggs, which should be
wall beaten, and flavour with either of the above ingredients, putting
in about 12 drops of the essence of almonds or vanilla, whichever is
preferred. Butter a pie-dish, and line the edges with puff-paste; put
in the pudding, and bake in a moderate oven for an hour. If the
pudding is boiled, add a little more tapioca, and boil it in a buttered
basin 1½ hour. Time.—1 hour to bake, 1½ hour to boil. Average
cost, 1s. 2d. Sufficient for 5 or 6 persons. Seasonable at any time.
TAPIOCA SOUP.

Ingredients.—5 oz. of tapioca, 2 quarts of stock. Mode.—Put the
tapioca into cold stock, and bring it gradually to a boil. Simmer
gently till tender, and serve. Time.—Rather more than 1 hour.
Average cost, 1s. 6d. per quart. Seasonable all the year. Sufficient
for 8 persons.
TARTLETS.
Ingredients.—Trimmings of puff-paste, any jam or marmalade
that may be preferred. Mode.—Roll out the paste to the thickness of
about ½ inch; butter some small round patty-pans, line them with it,
and cut off the superfluous paste close to the edge of the pan. Put a
small piece of bread into each tartlet (this is to keep them in shape),
and bake in a brisk oven for about 10 minutes, or rather longer.
When they are done, and are of a nice colour, take the pieces of
bread out carefully, and replace them by a spoonful of jam or
marmalade. Dish them high on a white d’oyley, piled high in the
centre, and serve. Time.—10 to 15 minutes. Average cost, 1d. each.
Sufficient.—1 lb. of paste will make 2 dishes of tartlets. Seasonable
at any time.
DISH OF TARTLETS.
TARTLETS, Polish.
Ingredients.—Puff-paste, the white of an egg, pounded sugar.
Mode.—Roll some good puff-paste out thin, and cut it into 2½-inch
squares; brush each square over with the white of an egg, then fold
down the corners, so that they all meet in the middle of each piece
of paste; slightly press the two pieces together, brush them over
with the egg, sift over sugar, and bake in a nice quick oven for about

¼ hour. When they are done, make a little hole in the middle of the
paste, and fill it up with apricot jam, marmalade, or red-currant jelly.
Pile them high in the centre of a dish, on a napkin, and garnish with
the same preserve the tartlets are filled with. Time.—¼ hour or 20
minutes. Average cost, with ½ lb. of puff-paste, 1s. Sufficient for 2
dishes of pastry. Seasonable at any time.
Note.—It should be borne in mind, that, for all dishes of small
pastry, such as the preceding, trimmings of puff-paste, left from
larger tarts, answer as well as making the paste expressly.
TEA, to make.
There is very little art in making good tea; if the water is boiling,
and there is no sparing of the fragrant leaf, the beverage will almost
invariably be good. The old-fashioned plan of allowing a teaspoonful
to each person, and one over, is still practised. Warm the teapot with
boiling water; let it remain for two or three minutes for the vessel to
become thoroughly hot, then pour it away. Put in the tea, pour in
from ½ to ¾ pint of boiling water, close the lid, and let it stand for
the tea to draw from 5 to 10 minutes; then fill up the pot with water.
The tea will be quite spoiled unless made with water that is actually
boiling, as the leaves will not open, and the flavour not be extracted
from them; the beverage will consequently be colourless and
tasteless,—in fact, nothing but tepid water. Where there is a very
large party to make tea for, it is a good plan to have two teapots,
instead of putting a large quantity of tea into one pot; the tea,
besides, will go farther. When the infusion has been once completed,
the addition of fresh tea adds very little to the strength; so, when
more is required, have the pot emptied of the old leaves, scalded,
and fresh tea made in the usual manner. Economists say that a few
grains of carbonate of soda, added before the boiling water is
poured on the tea, assist to draw out the goodness; if the water is
very hard, perhaps it is a good plan, as the soda softens it; but care
must be taken to use this ingredient sparingly, as it is liable to give
the tea a soapy taste if added in too large a quantity. For mixed tea,

the usual proportion is four spoonfuls of black to one of green; more
of the latter when the flavour is very much liked; but strong green
tea is highly pernicious, and should never be partaken of too freely.
Time.—2 minutes to warm the teapot, 5 to 10 minutes to draw the
strength from the tea. Sufficient.—Allow 1 teaspoonful to each
person.
TEA-CAKES.
Ingredients.—2 lbs. of flour, ½ teaspoonful of salt, ¼ lb. of butter
or lard, 1 egg, a piece of German yeast the size of a walnut, warm
milk. Mode.—Put the flour (which should be perfectly dry) into a
basin; mix with it the salt, and rub in the butter or lard; then beat
the egg well, stir to it the yeast, and add these to the flour with as
much warm milk as will make the whole into a smooth paste, and
knead it well. Let it rise near the fire, and, when well risen, form it
into cakes; place them on tins, let them rise again for a few minutes
before putting them into the oven, and bake from ¼ to ½ hour in a
moderate oven. These are very nice with a few currants and a little
sugar added to the other ingredients, they should be put in after the
butter is rubbed in. These cakes should be buttered, and eaten hot
as soon as baked; but, when stale, they are very nice split and
toasted; or, if dipped in milk, or even water, and covered with a
basin in the oven till hot, they will be almost equal to new. Time.—
¼ to ½ hour. Average cost, 10d. Sufficient to make 8 tea-cakes.
Seasonable at any time.
TEA-CAKES, to toast.
Cut each tea-cake into three or four slices, according to its
thickness; toast them on both sides before a nice clear fire, and as
each slice is done, spread it with butter on both sides. When a cake
is toasted, pile the slices one on the top of the other, cut them into
quarters, put them on a very hot plate, and send the cakes
immediately to table. As they are wanted, send them in hot, one or

two at a time, as, if allowed to stand, they spoil, unless kept in a
muffin-plate over a basin of boiling water.
TEA-CAKES.
TEAL, Roast.
Ingredients.—Teal, butter, a little flour. Mode.—Choose fat, plump
birds, after the frost has set in, as they are generally better
flavoured; truss them in the same manner as wild duck; roast them
before a brisk fire, and keep them well basted. Serve with brown or
orange gravy, water-cresses, and a cut lemon. The remains of teal
make excellent hash. Time.—From 9 to 15 minutes. Average cost,
1s. each; but seldom bought. Sufficient.—2 for a dish. Seasonable
from October to February.
TEAL.
Teal, being of the same character as widgeon and wild duck, may
be treated, in carving, in the same style.
TENCH, Matelot of.
Ingredients.—½ pint of stock, ½ pint of port wine, 1 dozen
button onions, a few mushrooms, a faggot of herbs, 2 blades of
mace, 1 oz. of butter, 1 teaspoonful of minced parsley, thyme, 1
shalot, 2 anchovies, 1 teacupful of stock, flour, 1 dozen oysters, the
juice of ½ lemon; the number of tench, according to size. Mode.—
Scale and clean the tench, cut them into pieces, and lay them in a
stewpan; add the stock, wine, onions, mushrooms, herbs, and mace,
and simmer gently for ½ hour. Put into another stewpan all the
remaining ingredients but the oysters and lemon-juice, and boil
slowly for 10 minutes, when add the strained liquor from the tench,

and keep stirring it over the fire until somewhat reduced. Rub it
through a sieve, pour it over the tench with the oysters, which must
be previously scalded in their own liquor, squeeze in the lemon-juice,
and serve. Garnish with croûtons. Time.—¾ hour. Seasonable from
October to June.
TENCH, Stewed with Wine.
Ingredients.—½ pint of stock, ½ pint of Madeira or sherry, salt
and pepper to taste, 1 bay-leaf, thickening of butter and flour. Mode.
—Clean and crimp the tench, carefully lay it in a stewpan with the
stock, wine, salt and pepper, and bay-leaf, let it stew gently for ½
hour; then take it out, put it on a dish, and keep hot. Strain the
liquor, and thicken it with butter and flour kneaded together, and
stew for 5 minutes. If not perfectly smooth, squeeze it through a
tammy, add a very little cayenne, and pour over the fish. Garnish
with balls of veal forcemeat. Time.—Rather more than ½ hour.
Seasonable from October to June.
TENDRONS DE VEAU, Stewed (an Entrée).
Ingredients.—The gristles from 2 breasts of veal, white stock, 1
faggot of savoury herbs, 2 blades of pounded mace, 4 cloves, 2
carrots, 2 onions, a strip of lemon-peel. Mode.—The tendrons or
gristles, which are found round the front of a breast of veal, are now
very frequently served as an entrée, and when well dressed, make a
nice and favourite dish. Detach the gristles from the bone, and cut
them neatly out, so as not to spoil the joint for roasting or stewing.
Put them into a stewpan, with sufficient stock to cover them; add
the herbs, mace, cloves, carrots, onions, and lemon, and simmer
these for nearly, or quite, 4 hours. They should be stewed until a
fork will enter the meat easily. Take them up, drain them, strain the
gravy, boil it down to a glaze, with which glaze the meat. Dish the
tendrons in a circle with croûtons fried of a nice colour placed
between each; and put mushroom sauce, or a purée of green peas

or tomatoes, in the middle. Time.—4 hours. Sufficient for 1 entrée.
Seasonable.—With peas, from June to August.
TENDRONS DE VEAU (an Entrée).
Ingredients.—The gristles from 2 breasts of veal, white stock, 1
faggot of savoury herbs, 1 blade of pounded mace, 4 cloves, 2
carrots, 2 onions, a strip of lemon-peel, egg and bread-crumbs, 2
tablespoonfuls of chopped mushrooms, salt and pepper to taste, 2
tablespoonfuls of sherry, the yolk of 1 egg, 3 tablespoonfuls of
cream. Mode.—After removing the gristles from a breast of veal,
stew them for 4 hours, as in the preceding recipe, with stock, herbs,
mace, cloves, carrots, onions, and lemon-peel. When perfectly
tender, lift them out and remove any bones or hard parts remaining.
Put them between two dishes, with a weight on the top, and when
cold, cut them into slices. Brush these over with egg, sprinkle with
bread-crumbs, and fry a pale brown. Take ½ pint of the gravy they
were boiled in, add 2 tablespoonfuls of chopped mushrooms, a
seasoning of salt and pepper, the sherry, and the yolk of an egg
beaten with 3 tablespoonfuls of cream. Stir the sauce over the fire
until it thickens; when it is on the point of boiling, dish the tendrons
in a circle, and pour the sauce in the middle. Tendrons are dressed
in a variety of ways,—with sauce à l’Espagnole, vegetables of all
kinds: when they are served with a purée, they should always be
glazed. Time.—4½ hours. Average cost.—Usually bought with breast
of veal. Sufficient for an entrée. Seasonable from March to October.
TETE DE VEAU EN TORTUE (an Entrée).
Ingredients.—Half a calf’s head, or the remains of a cold boiled
one; rather more than 1 pint of good white stock, 1 glass of sherry
or Madeira, cayenne and salt to taste, about 12 mushroom-buttons
(when obtainable), 6 hard-boiled eggs, 4 gherkins, 8 quenelles, or
forcemeat balls, 12 crayfish, 12 croûtons. Mode.—Half a calf’s head
is sufficient to make a good entrée, and if there are any remains of a
cold one left from the preceding day, it will answer very well for this

TIPSY CAKE.
dish. After boiling the head until tender, remove the bones, and cut
the meat into neat pieces; put the stock into a stewpan, add the
wine, and a seasoning of salt and cayenne; fry the mushrooms in
butter for 2 or 3 minutes, and add these to the gravy. Boil this
quickly until somewhat reduced; then put in the yolks of the hard-
boiled eggs whole, and the whites cut in small pieces, and the
gherkins chopped. Have ready a few veal quenelles, add these, with
the slices of head, to the other ingredients, and let the whole get
thoroughly hot, without boiling. Arrange the pieces of head as high
in the centre of the dish as possible; pour over them the ragoût, and
garnish with the crayfish and croûtons placed alternately. A little of
the gravy should also be served in a tureen. Time.—About ½ hour to
reduce the stock. Sufficient for 6 or 7 persons. Average cost,
exclusive of the calf’s head, 2s. 9d. Seasonable from March to
October.
TIPSY CAKE.
Ingredients.—1 moulded sponge or Savoy
cake, sufficient sweet wine or sherry to soak
it, 6 tablespoonfuls of brandy, 2 oz. of sweet
almonds, 1 pint of rich custard. Mode.—
Procure a cake that is three or four days old,
—either sponge, Savoy, or rice answering for
the purpose of a tipsy cake. Cut the bottom
of the cake level, to make it stand firm in
the dish; make a small hole in the centre,
and pour in and over the cake sufficient
sweet wine or sherry, mixed with the above
proportion of brandy, to soak it nicely. When
the cake is well soaked, blanch and cut the almonds into strips, stick
them all over the cake, and pour round it a good custard, made by
our recipe, allowing 8 eggs instead of 5 to the pint of milk. The
cakes are sometimes crumbled and soaked, and a whipped cream
heaped over them, the same as for trifles. Time.—About 2 hours to

soak the cake. Average cost, 4s. 6d. Sufficient for 1 dish. Seasonable
at any time.
TIPSY CAKE, an easy way of making.
Ingredients.—12 stale small sponge-cakes, raisin wine, ½ lb. of
jam, 1 pint of custard (see Custard). Mode.—Soak the sponge-cakes,
which should be stale (on this account they should be cheaper), in a
little raisin wine; arrange them on a deep glass dish in four layers,
putting a layer of jam between each, and pour round them a pint of
custard, made by recipe, decorating the top with cut preserved-fruit.
Time.—2 hours to soak the cakes. Average cost, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for
1 dish. Seasonable at any time.
TOAD-IN-THE-HOLE (Cold Meat Cookery).
Ingredients.—6 oz. of flour, 1 pint of milk, 3 eggs, butter, a few
slices of cold mutton, pepper and salt to taste, 2 kidneys. Mode.—
Make a smooth batter of flour, milk, and eggs in the above
proportion; butter a baking-dish, and pour in the batter. Into this
place a few slices of cold mutton, previously well seasoned, and the
kidneys, which should be cut into rather small pieces; bake about 1
hour, or rather longer, and send it to table in the dish it was baked
in. Oysters or mushrooms may be substituted for the kidneys, and
will be found exceedingly good. Time.—Rather more than 1 hour.
Average cost, exclusive of the cold meat, 8d. Seasonable at any
time.
TOAD-IN-THE-HOLE (a Homely but Savoury
Dish).
Ingredients.—1½ lb. of rump-steak, 1 sheep’s kidney, pepper and
salt to taste. For the batter, 3 eggs, 1 pint of milk, 4 tablespoonfuls
of flour, ½ saltspoonful of salt. Mode.—Cut up the steak and kidney
into convenient-sized pieces, and put them into a pie-dish, with a

good seasoning of salt and pepper; mix the flour with a small
quantity of milk at first, to prevent its being lumpy; add the
remainder, and the 3 eggs, which should be well beaten; put in the
salt, stir the batter for about 5 minutes, and pour it over the steak.
Place it in a tolerably brisk oven immediately, and bake for 1½ hour.
Time.—1½ hour. Average cost, 1s. 9d. Sufficient for 4 or 5 persons.
Seasonable at any time.
Note.—The remains of cold beef, rather underdone, may be
substituted for the steak, and, when liked, the smallest possible
quantity of minced onion or shalot may be added.
TOAST, to make Dry.
To make dry toast properly, a great deal of attention is required;
much more, indeed, than people generally suppose. Never use new
bread for making any kind of toast, as it eats heavy, and, besides, is
very extravagant. Procure a loaf of household bread about two days
old; cut off as many slices as may be required, not quite ¼ inch in
thickness; trim off the crusts and ragged edges, put the bread on a
toasting-fork, and hold it before a very clear fire. Move it backwards
and forwards until the bread is nicely coloured; then turn it and toast
the other side, and do not place it so near the fire that it blackens.
Dry toast should be more gradually made than buttered toast, as its
great beauty consists in its crispness, and this cannot be attained
unless the process is slow and the bread is allowed gradually to
colour. It should never be made long before it is wanted, as it soon
becomes tough, unless placed on the fender in front of the fire. As
soon as each piece is ready, it should be put into a rack, or stood
upon its edges, and sent quickly to table.
TOAST, to make Hot Buttered.
A loaf of household bread about two days old answers for making
toast better than cottage bread, the latter not being a good shape,
and too crusty for the purpose. Cut as many nice even slices as may

be required, rather more than ¼ inch in thickness, and toast them
before a very bright fire, without allowing the bread to blacken,
which spoils the appearance and flavour of all toast. When of a nice
colour on both sides, put it on a hot plate; divide some good butter
into small pieces, place them on the toast, set this before the fire,
and when the butter is just beginning to melt, spread it lightly over
the toast. Trim off the crust and ragged edges, divide each round
into 4 pieces, and send the toast quickly to table. Some persons cut
the slices of toast across from corner to corner, so making the pieces
of a three-cornered shape. Soyer recommends that each slice should
be cut into pieces as soon as it is buttered, and when all are ready,
that they should be piled lightly on the dish they are intended to be
served on. He says that by cutting through 4 or 5 slices at a time, all
the butter is squeezed out of the upper ones, while the bottom one
is swimming in fat liquid. It is highly essential to use good butter for
making this dish.
TOAST-AND-WATER.
Ingredients.—A slice of bread, 1 quart of boiling water. Mode.—
Cut a slice from a stale loaf (a piece of hard crust is better than
anything else for the purpose), toast it of a nice brown on every
side, but do not allow it to burn or blacken. Put it into a jug, pour
the boiling water over it, cover it closely, and let it remain until cold.
When strained, it will be ready for use. Toast-and-water should
always be made a short time before it is required, to enable it to get
cold: if drunk in a tepid or lukewarm state, it is an exceedingly
disagreeable beverage. If, as is sometimes the case, this drink is
wanted in a hurry, put the toasted bread into a jug, and only just
cover it with the boiling water; when this is cool, cold water may be
added in the proportion required, the toast-and-water strained; it will
then be ready for use, and is more expeditiously prepared than by
the above method.
TOAST SANDWICHES.

Ingredients.—Thin cold toast, thin slices of bread-and-butter,
pepper and salt to taste. Mode.—Place a very thin piece of cold toast
between 2 slices of thin bread-and-butter in the form of a sandwich,
adding a seasoning of pepper and salt. This sandwich may be varied
by adding a little pulled meat, or very fine slices of cold meat, to the
toast, and in any of these forms will be found very tempting to the
appetite of an invalid.
TOFFEE, Everton.
Ingredients.—1 lb. of powdered loaf sugar, 1 teacupful of water,
¼ lb. of butter, 6 drops of essence of lemon. Mode.—Put the water
and sugar into a brass pan, and beat the butter to a cream. When
the sugar is dissolved, add the butter, and keep stirring the mixture
over the fire until it sets, when a little is poured on to a buttered
dish; and just before the toffee is done, add the essence of lemon.
Butter a dish or tin, pour on it the mixture, and when cool, it will
easily separate from the dish. Butter-Scotch, an excellent thing for
coughs, is made with brown, instead of white sugar, omitting the
water, and flavoured with ½ oz. of powdered ginger. It is made in
the same manner as toffee. Time.—18 to 35 minutes. Average cost,
10d. Sufficient to make a lb. of toffee.
TOMATO SAUCE for Keeping (Excellent).
Ingredients.—To every quart of tomato-pulp allow 1 pint of
cayenne vinegar, ¾ oz. of shalots, ¾ oz. of garlic, peeled and cut in
slices; salt to taste. To every six quarts of liquor, 1 pint of soy, 1 pint
of anchovy-sauce. Mode.—Gather the tomatoes quite ripe; bake
them in a slow oven till tender; rub them through a sieve, and to
every quart of pulp add cayenne vinegar, shalots, garlic, and salt, in
the above proportion; boil the whole together till the garlic and
shalots are quite soft; then rub it through a sieve, put it again into a
saucepan, and, to every six quarts of the liquor, add 1 pint of soy
and the same quantity of anchovy-sauce, and boil altogether for
about 20 minutes; bottle off for use, and carefully seal or resin the

corks. This will keep good for 2 or 3 years, but will be fit for use in a
week. A useful and less expensive sauce may be made by omitting
the anchovy and soy. Time.—Altogether 1 hour. Seasonable.—Make
this from the middle of September to the end of October.
TOMATO SAUCE for Keeping (Excellent).
Ingredients.—1 dozen tomatoes, 2 teaspoonfuls of the best
powdered ginger, 1 dessertspoonful of salt, 1 head of garlic chopped
fine, 2 tablespoonfuls of vinegar, 1 dessertspoonful of Chili vinegar
(a small quantity of cayenne may be substituted for this). Mode.—
Choose ripe tomatoes, put them into a stone jar, and stand them in
a cool oven until quite tender; when cold, take the skins and stalks
from them, mix the pulp with the liquor which is in the jar, but do
not strain it; add all the other ingredients, mix well together, and put
it into well-sealed bottles. Stored away in a cool, dry place, it will
keep good for years. It is ready for use as soon as made, but the
flavour is better after a week or two. Should it not appear to keep,
turn it out, and boil it up with a little additional ginger and cayenne.
For immediate use, the skins should be put into a wide-mouthed
bottle with a little of the different ingredients, and they will be found
very nice for hashes or stews. Time.—4 or 5 hours in a cool oven.
Seasonable from the middle of September to the end of October.
TOMATO SAUCE for Keeping (Excellent).
Ingredients.—3 dozen tomatoes; to every pound of tomato-pulp
allow 1 pint of Chili vinegar, 1 oz. of garlic, 1 oz. of shalot, 2 oz. of
salt, 1 large green capsicum, ½ teaspoonful of cayenne, 2 pickled
gherkins, 6 pickled onions, 1 pint of common vinegar, and the juice
of 6 lemons. Mode.—Choose the tomatoes when quite ripe and red;
put them in a jar with a cover to it, and bake them till tender. The
better way is to put them in the oven overnight, when it will not be
too hot, and examine them in the morning to see if they are tender.
Do not allow them to remain in the oven long enough to break
them; but they should be sufficiently soft to skin nicely and rub

through the sieve. Measure the pulp, and to each pound of pulp add
the above proportion of vinegar and other ingredients, taking care to
chop very fine the garlic, shalot, capsicum, onion, and gherkins. Boil
the whole together till everything is tender; then again rub it
through a sieve, and add the lemon-juice. Now boil the whole again
till it becomes as thick as cream, and keep continually stirring; bottle
it when quite cold, cork well, and seal the corks. If the flavour of
garlic and shalot is very much disliked, diminish the quantities. Time.
—Bake the tomatoes in a cool oven all night. Seasonable from the
middle of September to the end of October.
Note.—A quantity of liquor will flow from the tomatoes, which
must be put through the sieve with the rest. Keep it well stirred
whilst on the fire, and use a wooden spoon.
TOMATO SAUCE, Hot, to serve with Cutlets,
Roast Meats, &c.
Ingredients.—6 tomatoes, 2 shalots, 1 clove, 1 blade of mace,
salt and cayenne to taste, ¼ pint of gravy or stock. Mode.—Cut the
tomatoes in two, and squeeze the juice and seeds out; put them in a
stewpan with all the ingredients, and let them simmer gently until
the tomatoes are tender enough to pulp; rub the whole through a
sieve, boil it for a few minutes, and serve. The shalots and spices
may be omitted when their flavour is objected to. Time.—1 hour, or
rather more, to simmer the tomatoes. Average cost, for this quantity,
1s. In full season in September and October.
TOMATOES, Baked (Excellent).
Ingredients.—8 or 10 tomatoes, pepper and salt to taste, 2 oz. of
butter, bread-crumbs. Mode.—Take off the stalks from the tomatoes;
cut them into thick slices, and put them into a deep baking-dish; add
a plentiful seasoning of pepper and salt, and butter in the above
proportion; cover the whole with bread-crumbs; drop over these a
little clarified butter; bake in a moderate oven from 20 minutes to ½

hour, and serve very hot. This vegetable dressed as above, is an
exceedingly nice accompaniment to all kinds of roast meat. The
tomatoes, instead of being cut in slices, may be baked whole; but
they will take rather longer time to cook. Time.—20 minutes to ½
hour. Average cost, in full season, 9d. per basket. Sufficient for 5 or
6 persons. Seasonable in August, September, and October; but may
be had, forced, much earlier.
TOMATOES, Baked (another Mode).
Ingredients.—Some bread-crumbs, a little butter, onion, cayenne,
and salt. Mode.—Bake the tomatoes whole, then scoop out a small
hole at the top; fry the bread-crumbs, onion, &c., and fill the holes
with this as high up as possible; then brown the tomatoes with a
salamander, or in an oven, and take care that the skin does not
break.
TOMATOES, Stewed.
Ingredients.—8 tomatoes, pepper and salt to taste, 2 oz. of
butter, 2 tablespoonfuls of vinegar. Mode.—Slice the tomatoes into a
lined saucepan; season them with pepper and salt, and place small
pieces of butter on them. Cover the lid down closely, and stew from
20 to 25 minutes, or until the tomatoes are perfectly tender; add the
vinegar, stir two or three times, and serve with any kind of roast
meat, with which they will be found a delicious accompaniment.
Time.—20 to 25 minutes. Average cost, in full season, 9d. per
basket. Sufficient for 4 or 5 persons. Seasonable from August to
October; but may be had, forced, much earlier.
STEWED TOMATOES.
TOMATOES, Stewed.

Ingredients.—8 tomatoes, about ½ pint of good gravy, thickening
of butter and flour, cayenne and salt to taste. Mode.—Take out the
stalks of the tomatoes; put them into a wide stewpan, pour over
them the above proportion of good brown gravy, and stew gently
until they are tender, occasionally carefully turning them, that they
may be equally done. Thicken the gravy with a little butter and flour
worked together on a plate; let it just boil up after the thickening is
added, and serve. If it be at hand, these should be served on a silver
or plated vegetable-dish. Time.—20 to 25 minutes, very gentle
stewing. Average cost, in full season, 9d. per basket. Sufficient for 4
or 5 persons. Seasonable in August, September, and October; but
may be had, forced, much earlier.
TONGUE, Boiled.
Ingredients.—1 tongue, a bunch of savoury herbs, water. Mode.—
In choosing a tongue, ascertain how long it has been dried or
pickled, and select one with a smooth skin, which denotes its being
young and tender. If a dried one, and rather hard, soak it at least for
12 hours previous to cooking it; if, however, it is fresh from the
pickle, 2 or 3 hours will be sufficient for it to remain in soak. Put the
tongue into a stewpan with plenty of cold water and a bunch of
savoury herbs; let it gradually come to a boil, skim well, and simmer
very gently until tender. Peel off the skin, garnish with tufts of
cauliflowers or Brussels sprouts, and serve. Boiled tongue is
frequently sent to table with boiled poultry, instead of ham, and is,
by many persons, preferred. If to serve cold, peel it, fasten it down
to a piece of board by sticking a fork through the root, and another
through the top, to straighten it. When cold, glaze it, and put a
paper ruche round the root, and garnish with tufts of parsley. Time.
—A large smoked tongue, 4 to 4½ hours; a small one, 2½ to 3
hours. A large unsmoked tongue, 3 to 3½ hours; a small one, 2 to
2½ hours. Average cost, for a moderate-sized tongue, 3s. 6d.
Seasonable at any time.

TONGUES, to Cure.
Ingredients.—For a tongue of 7 lbs., 1 oz. of saltpetre, ½ oz. of
black pepper, 4 oz. of sugar, 3 oz. of juniper berries, 6 oz. of salt.
Mode.—Rub the above ingredients well into the tongue, and let it
remain in the pickle for 10 days or a fortnight; then drain it, tie it up
in brown paper, and have it smoked for about 20 days over a wood
fire; or it may be boiled out of this pickle. Time.—From 10 to 14
days to remain in the pickle; to be smoked 24 days. Average cost,
for a medium-sized uncured tongue, 2s. 6d. Seasonable at any time.
Note.—If not wanted immediately, the tongue will keep 3 or 4
weeks without being too salt; then it must not be rubbed, but only
turned in the pickle.
TONGUES, to Cure.
Ingredients.—9 lbs. of salt, 8 oz. of sugar, 9 oz. of powdered
saltpetre. Mode.—Rub the above ingredients well into the tongues,
and keep them in this curing mixture for 2 months, turning them
every day. Drain them from the pickle, cover with brown paper, and
have them smoked for about 3 weeks. Time.—The tongues to
remain in pickle 2 months; to be smoked 3 weeks. Sufficient.—The
above quantity of brine sufficient for 12 tongues, of 5 lbs. each.
Seasonable at any time.
TONGUE, to Pickle and Dress a, to Eat Cold.
Ingredients.—6 oz. of salt, 2 oz. of bay-salt, 1 oz. of saltpetre, 3
oz. of coarse sugar; cloves, mace, and allspice to taste; butter,
common crust of flour and water. Mode.—Lay the tongue for a
fortnight in the above pickle, turn it every day, and be particular that
the spices are well pounded; put it into a small pan just large
enough to hold it, place some pieces of butter on it, and cover with
a common crust. Bake in a slow oven until so tender that a straw
would penetrate it; take off the skin, fasten it down to a piece of

TRIFLE.
board by running a fork through the root, and another through the
tip, at the same time straightening it and putting it into shape. When
cold, glaze it, put a paper ruche round the root, which is generally
very unsightly, and garnish with tufts of parsley. Time.—From 3 to 4
hours in a slow oven, according to size. Average cost, for a medium-
sized uncured tongue, 2s. 6d. Seasonable at any time.
TREACLE PUDDING, Rolled.
Ingredients.—1 lb. of suet crust, ¼ lb. of treacle, ½ teaspoonful
of grated ginger. Mode.—Make, with 1 lb. of flour, a suet crust by our
given recipe, roll it out to the thickness of ½ inch, and spread the
treacle equally over it, leaving a small margin where the paste joins;
close the ends securely, tie the pudding in a floured cloth, plunge it
into boiling water, and boil for 2 hours. We have inserted this
pudding, being economical, and a favourite one with children; it is,
of course, only suitable for a nursery, or very plain family dinner.
Made with a lard instead of a suet crust, it would be very nice
baked, and would be sufficiently done in from 1½ to 2 hours. Time.
—Boiled pudding, 2 hours; baked pudding, 1½ to 2 hours. Average
cost, 7d. Sufficient for 5 or 6 persons. Seasonable at any time.
TRIFLE, to make a.
Ingredients.—For the whip, 1 pint of
cream, 3 oz. of pounded sugar, the white of
2 eggs, a small glass of sherry or raisin
wine. For the trifle, 1 pint of custard, made
with 8 eggs to a pint of milk; 6 small
sponge-cakes, or 6 slices of sponge-cake;
12 macaroons, 2 dozen ratafias, 2 oz. of
sweet almonds, the grated rind of 1 lemon,
a layer of raspberry or strawberry jam, ½
pint of sherry or sweet wine, 6
tablespoonfuls of brandy.

Mode.—The whip to lay over the top of the trifle should be made
the day before it is required for table, as the flavour is better, and it
is much more solid than when prepared the same day. Put into a
large bowl the pounded sugar, the whites of the eggs, which should
be beaten to a stiff froth, a glass of sherry or sweet wine, and the
cream. Whisk these ingredients well in a cool place, and take off the
froth with a skimmer as fast as it rises, and put it on a sieve to
drain; continue the whisking till there is sufficient of the whip, which
must be put away in a cool place to drain. The next day, place the
sponge-cakes, macaroons, and ratafias at the bottom of a trifle-dish;
pour over them ½ pint of sherry or sweet wine, mixed with 6
tablespoonfuls of brandy, and, should this proportion of wine not be
found quite sufficient, add a little more, as the cakes should be well
soaked. Over the cakes pat the grated lemon-rind, the sweet
almonds, blanched and cut into strips, and a layer of raspberry or
strawberry jam. Make a good custard, by recipe, using 8 instead of 5
eggs to the pint of milk, and let this cool a little; then pour it over
the cakes, &c. The whip being made the day previously, and the
trifle prepared, there remains nothing to do now but heap the whip
lightly over the top: this should stand as high as possible, and it may
be garnished with strips of bright currant jelly (see illustration),
crystallized sweetmeats, or flowers; the small coloured comfits are
sometimes used for the purpose of garnishing a trifle, but they are
now considered rather old-fashioned. Average cost, with cream at
1s. per pint, 5s. 6d. Sufficient for 1 trifle. Seasonable at any time.
TRIFLE, Indian.
Ingredients.—1 quart of milk, the rind of ½ large lemon, sugar to
taste, 5 heaped tablespoonfuls of rice-flour, 1 oz. of sweet almonds,
½ pint of custard.
Mode.—Boil the milk and lemon-rind together until the former is
well flavoured; take out the lemon-rind and stir in the rice-flour,
which should first be moistened with cold milk, and add sufficient
loaf sugar to sweeten it nicely. Boil gently for about 5 minutes, and

keep the mixture stirred; take it off the fire, let it cool a little, and
pour it into a glass dish. When cold, cut the rice out in the form of a
star, or any other shape that may be preferred; take out the spare
rice, and fill the space with boiled custard. Blanch and cut the
almonds into strips; stick them over the trifle, and garnish it with
pieces of bright-coloured jelly, or preserved fruits, or candied citron.
Time.—¼ hour to simmer the milk, 5 minutes after the rice is
added. Average cost, 1s. Sufficient for 1 trifle. Seasonable at any
time.
TRIPE, to Dress.
Ingredients.—Tripe, onion sauce, milk and water. Mode.—
Ascertain that the tripe is quite fresh, and have it cleaned and
dressed. Cut away the coarsest fat, and boil it in equal proportions
of milk and water for ¾ hour. Should the tripe be entirely undressed,
more than double that time should be allowed for it. Have ready
some onion sauce, made by our given recipe, dish the tripe, smother
it with the sauce, and the remainder send to table in a tureen. Time.
—¾ hour; for undressed tripe, from 2½ to three hours. Average
cost, 7d. per lb. Seasonable at any time.
Note.—Tripe may be dressed in a variety of ways: it may be cut in
pieces and fried in batter, stewed in gravy with mushrooms, or cut
into collops, sprinkled with minced onion and savoury herbs, and
fried a nice brown in clarified butter.
TROUT, Stewed.
Ingredients.—2 middling-sized trout, ½ onion cut in thin slices, a
little parsley, 2 cloves, 1 blade of mace, 2 bay-leaves, a little thyme,
salt and pepper to taste, 1 pint of medium stock, 1 glass of port
wine, thickening of butter and flour. Mode.—Wash the fish very
clean, and wipe it quite dry. Lay it in a stewpan, with all the
ingredients but the butter and flour, and simmer gently for ½ hour,
or rather more, should not the fish be quite done. Take it out, strain

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A Question Of Worth Economy Society And The Quantification Of Human Value Christopher Steed

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