Book ID: CBB716718351

The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life (2017)

unapi

Cook, Eli (Author)


Harvard University Press


Publication Date: 2017
Physical Details: 352; notes, index
Language: English

How did Americans come to quantify their society's progress and well-being in units of money? In today's GDP-run world, prices are the standard measure of not only our goods and commodities but our environment, our communities, our nation, even our self-worth. The Pricing of Progress traces the long history of how and why we moderns adopted the monetizing values and valuations of capitalism as an indicator of human prosperity while losing sight of earlier social and moral metrics that did not put a price on everyday life. Cook roots the rise of economic indicators in the emergence of modern capitalism and the contested history of English enclosure, Caribbean slavery, American industrialization, economic thought, and corporate power. He explores how the maximization of market production became the chief objective of American economic and social policy. We see how distinctly capitalist quantification techniques used to manage or invest in railroad corporations, textile factories, real estate holdings, or cotton plantations escaped the confines of the business world and seeped into every nook and cranny of society. As economic elites quantified the nation as a for-profit, capitalized investment, the progress of its inhabitants, free or enslaved, came to be valued according to their moneymaking abilities. Today as in the nineteenth century, political struggles rage over who gets to determine the statistical yardsticks used to gauge the "health" of our economy and nation.The Pricing of Progress helps us grasp the limits and dangers of entrusting economic indicators to measure social welfare and moral goals. (Worldcat)

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Reviewed By

Review Thomas A. Stapleford (Summer 2018) Review of "The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life". Business History Review (pp. 365-368). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB716718351/

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Authors & Contributors
Skee, James Dalgoff
Wonham, Henry
Ryan Dearinger
Katherine Hood
Sen, Priya Vari
Fisher, George C.
Concepts
Progress, ideas of
Quantification
Technology and culture
Science and society
Valuation
Expertise
Time Periods
20th century, late
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, early
Gilded Age (1870s-1900)
Places
United States
Western states (U.S.)
England
Soviet Union
Great Britain
Brazil
Institutions
United States. Geological Survey
UNESCO
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