“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
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
