Monday, October 23, 2017

HOW MONEY BECAME THE MEASURE OF EVERYTHING


“Two centuries ago, America pioneered a way of thinking that puts human well-being in economic terms”
By: Eli Cook
Level of difficulty: ***
BEFORE YOU READ
·         An introduction to capitalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLNW0sZKYhU
·         History of ideas: Capitalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIuaW9YWqEU
·         How to improve capitalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOaJe68C-bU
QUESTIONS
1.       What does the phrase “this historical pattern” in the second paragraph refer to?
2.       What is the major implication of the current practice of assessing well-being in monetary terms?
What is now being considered is …..
3.       The result of the Hamilton inquiry is surprising by modern day standards in that….
4.       What conclusion can be drawn from the paragraph beginning “Until the 1850’s”?
5.       What does the phrase “This epochal shift” refer to?
6.       What historic implication did the above shift have?
7.       There was a reason for the above adoption of a different yardstick to measure well-being. It was the fact that America was no longer ………and had become……..
8.        What feature of capitalism made the application of moral statistics impossible? The fact that …………… (There are two answers; find both)
9.       The pouring of money into urban real estate and railroad building in the North eventually led to the emergence of……………….whose focus was….
10.   What disturbing trend did capitalization lend support to in the South? How many possible answers can you find in the paragraph?
11.   Read the paragraph beginning “As corporate quantification…” and the following one. What subtitle would you give this section:
·         The effects of corporate consolidation
·         Capitalist quantification gone mad
·         Everything is a national asset
·         Potential wealth producers everywhere
12.   Irvin Fisher saw an upside to putting a price social problems. It was the fact that people were more prepared to…
13.   How does the writer reach the conclusion that “The assignment of prices to features of daily life was never a foregone conclusion but rather a highly contested development”?
14.   What disturbing consequence did the universal acceptance of economic indicators as apolitical and objective have?
15.   Despite the material benefits of considering society as a capital investment, there is also a disturbing downside:
16.   In the text, the election of Trump as president is directly linked to the focus on….
WRITING TASK
Write an essay in which you argue for or against using money based metrics to measure well-being. Use the text and the videos. Watch this video before you start:
Is Capitalism Saving or Destroying Us? | Davis Smith | TEDxSaltLakeCity
HOW MONEY BECAME THE MEASURE OF EVERYTHING
This wonderful text traces the emergence of capitalism and as such is a very topical issue. There is quite a vocabulary load but the text is so well written and the analysis so good that it should fly. There is a demanding writing task, which should be covered.
1.       That residents well being was not measured in terms of monetary earnings
2.       Whether individuals are meeting the exigencies of the economy
3.       Americans in the early republic did not see, count, or put a price on the world
4.       Their unit of measure was bodies and minds never dollars and cents
5.       The shift from moral statistics to money based economic indicators
6.       It turned many men of capital to the anti-slavery cause
7.       Commercial society / capitalist society
8.       Basic elements of society and life are transformed or capitalized into income generating assets (Including the parenthesis is fine but this is the minimum)/ Imagining the whole world as a capitalized investment and its inhabitants as inputs of human capital that could be plugged into output maximizing equations of monetized growth
9.       A national business class / a town’s industrial output, population growth, real estate prices, labor costs, railway traffic and per-capita productivity
10.   Investment in human bodies / Enslavement of people / The fact that enslaved people truly became pieces of capital that could be mortgaged, rented, insured and sold in liquid markets
11.   The second
12.   Sit up and take notice
13.   Massachusetts labor activists stated that the true prosperity and abiding good and the commonwealth can only be learned by placing money on one scale and man on another
14.   The necessary conditions for economic growth were frequently placed before the necessary conditions for individuals’ well-being
15.   Money-based metrics have turned human betterment into a secondary concern

16.   Money based metrics

No comments:

Post a Comment