What do we really value? I use the word "really" here to differentiate what we say we value from our behaviors and choices that reflect what we really value.
In a consumerist economy, money is the measure of all things: time is money, credentials are money, efficiency is money, status is money, health is money and so on. Money is what we really value because it's the universal Valuable Thing.
Not having enough money to pay our bills ruins us, so having enough money to pay our bills is inescapably valuable. But what we do with our money reflects a much more complicated picture of what we really value.
We value money so we work a lot of hours to make more money, so we're under time pressure and tired so we spend hundreds of dollars on take-out food each week that eventually ruins our health, which is what we say we value but don't actually value more than money.
In a consumerist economy, the "market" sets the price of everything, so price is the measure of all value. But price is not actually equivalent to value.
If I spend 10 hours growing $25 of vegetables in my yard, and I could make $25 in an hour of paid work, then the "market" considers this a waste of valuable time because time is money and money is what we really value because it can buy everything.
Actually, money can't buy everything. It can actually only buy a narrow band of things and experiences in the very wide spectrum of human life. If I chose to work the extra hour and buy tomatoes at the market, the tomatoes are tasteless because they've been selected for hardiness and a long shelf life to be attractive after shipping.The soil they're grown in is likely a low-nutrient factory-farmed desert, so the tasteless tomato also has low nutritional value. Neither the taste nor the nutrient content is in the "market" price, and so the value of taste and nutrient content doesn't register, as the "market" lacks the means to measure these qualities.
https://charleshughsmith.substack.com/p/what-do-we-value