How Money Became the Measure of Everything

Two centuries ago, America pioneered a way of thinking that puts human well-being in economic terms.

• Eli Cook
• The Atlantic

Money and markets have been around for thousands of years. Yet as central as currency has been to so many civilizations, people in societies as different as ancient Greece, imperial China, medieval Europe, and colonial America did not measure residents’ well-being in terms of monetary earnings or economic output.

In the mid-19th century, the United States—and to a lesser extent other industrializing nations such as England and Germany—departed from this historical pattern.It was then that American businesspeople and…

• How Money Became…