Can money measure anything other than itself?

If you can measure, you can compare. If you can measure, you can aggregate. If you can measure and aggregate, you can compute; and if you can compute, technology now permits perhaps limitless sophistication of analysis. But measurement is one-dimensional and always leaves something behind. The cost of measurement is usually measured by some loss of understanding.

Money was designed to value goods and services in exchange. Prices are a means to exchange different goods, by a single unit of measurement: money. Exchange in a complex division of labour is greatly facilitated by a common standard of measurement. By introducing a market, money can be used to measure almost anything. In fact, at some point in history, human beings have probably priced everything. Nothing is intrinsically outside the range of exchange.

But price is not value. The term “value” is ambiguous. “Valuable” is sometimes a synonym for “expensive”. But often we use the word to describe things we really care about. Monetary value is not determined by usefulness or importance, but by scarcity.