钱主天下 | 大西洋月刊

How Money Became the Measure of Everything

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.

金钱和市场运行了数千年。尽管一直以来，货币对众多文明都很重要，可各个社会中的人，不论古希腊、中华帝国、中世纪的欧洲还是殖民地美洲，都不把货币收入或经济产出当做衡量其居民的幸福的手段。

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 policymakers started to measure progress in dollar amounts, tabulating social welfare based on people’s capacity to generate income. 

十九世纪中叶，美利坚合众国——在一定程度上，还有英格兰和德意志等其他正在工业化的国家——偏离了这一历史模式。当时，美国商人和决策者开始用美元衡量进步，以人们创造收入的能力对标社会幸福。

This fundamental shift, in time, transformed the way Americans appraised not only investments and businesses but also their communities, their environment, and even themselves.

这种根本性变革不仅改变了美国人评估投资和商业的方式，还改变了他们的社群、环境甚至人自己的看法。

Today, well-being may seem hard to quantify in a nonmonetary way, but indeed other metrics—from incarceration rates to life expectancy—have held sway in the course of the country’s history. The turn away from these statistics, and toward financial ones, means that rather than considering how economic developments could meet Americans’ needs, the default stance—in policy, business, and everyday life—is to assess whether individuals are meeting the exigencies of the economy.

今天，幸福看起来很难用一种非金钱的方式量化，可实际上，入狱率和预期寿命等其他尺度曾经是这个国家历史上的主流。抛弃了这些数据，转而投向金钱的怀抱，这意味着人们不再考虑经济发展如何满足美国人的需要，在执政、经商和日常生活中，人们默认为，该反过来评价个人是否满足经济体的要求。

At the turn of the 19th century, it did not appear that financial metrics were going to define Americans’ concept of progress. In 1791, then-Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton wrote to various Americans across the country, asking them to calculate the moneymaking capacities of their farms, workshops, and families so that he could use that data to create economic indicators for his famous Report on Manufactures. Hamilton was greatly disappointed by the paltry responses he received and had to give up on adding price statistics to his report. Apparently, most Americans in the early republic did not see, count, or put a price on the world as he did.

进入十九世纪时，看起来金钱尺度并未决定美国人对进步的看法。1791年，时任财长亚历山大·汉密尔顿给全国各族美国人写信，要求他们计算农场、作坊和家庭的盈利能力，准备用这些数据制定经济指标，撰写他著名的《制造业报告》。汉密尔顿很失望，因为回应者寡，最后他不得不放弃在报告中加入价格统计内容。显然，共和国成立之初，多数美国人不像汉密尔顿一样给世界定个价钱。

Until the 1850s, in fact, by far the most popular and dominant form of social measurement in 19th-century America (as in Europe) were a collection of social indicators known then as “moral statistics,” which quantified such phenomena as prostitution, incarceration, literacy, crime, education, insanity, pauperism, life expectancy, and disease. 

事实上，直到十九世纪五十年代，美国（以及欧洲）最流行和最主要的社会评价指标仍然是各类社会指标，当时被称为“道德统计”，这种方法量化了妓女、入狱率、识字率、犯罪率、教育程度、疯子数量、乞丐比例、预期寿命和疾病情况等社会现象。

While these moral statistics were laden with paternalism, they nevertheless focused squarely on the physical, social, spiritual, and mental condition of the American people. For better or for worse, they placed human beings at the center of their calculating vision. Their unit of measure was bodies and minds, never dollars and cents.

这种道德统计颇有些家长统治的意味，却实实在在地关注了美国人民的身体、社会、信仰和精神状况。好坏不论，他们将人放在思考未来的中心。他们的统计单位是身与心，而非美元。

Yet around the middle of the century, money-based economic indicators began to gain prominence, eventually supplanting moral statistics as the leading benchmarks of American prosperity. This epochal shift can be seen in the national debates over slavery. In the earlier parts of the 19th century, Americans in the North and South wielded moral statistics in order to prove that their society was the more advanced and successful one. 

但在那个世纪中叶，以金钱为基础的经济指标开始流行，并最终取代了道德统计，成为美国繁荣的主要基准。这一划时代的转变在国家对奴隶制的讨论中可见一斑。在十九世纪上半叶，北方和南方的美国人都挥舞着道德统计，旨在证明他们的社会更先进，更成功。

In the North, abolitionist newspapers like the Liberty Almanac pointed to the fact that the North had far more students, scholars, libraries, and colleges. In the South, politicians like John Calhoun used dubious data to argue that freedom was bad for black people. The proportion of Northern blacks “who are deaf and dumb, blind, idiots, insane, paupers and in prison,” Calhoun claimed in 1844, was “one out of every six,” while in the South it was “one of every one hundred and fifty-four.”

在北方，《自由年鉴》等废奴主义报纸指出这一事实，说北方有更多学生、学者、图书馆和大学。南方的政客，如约翰·卡尔霍恩，则用不太可信的数据辩称，自由对黑人而言是糟糕的。卡尔霍恩1844年称，北方黑人中，“聋子、哑巴、盲人、傻子、疯子、乞丐和囚犯”的比例达到“一比六”，而南方只有“一比一百五十四”。

By the late 1850s, however, most Northern and Southern politicians and businessmen had abandoned such moral statistics in favor of economic metrics. In the opening chapter of his best-selling 1857 book against slavery, the author Hinton Helper measured the “progress and prosperity” of the North and the South by tabulating the cash value of agricultural produce that both regions had extracted from the earth. 

然而到十九世纪五十年代末，多数南北方的政客及商人都放弃了道德统计，转而诉诸经济尺度。作者辛顿·海尔珀1957年反对奴隶制的畅销书头一章中，计算了农产品收获的现金价值，以衡量南北两方的“进步和繁荣”。

In so doing, he calculated that in 1850 the North was clearly the more advanced society, for it had produced $351,709,703 of goods and the South only $306,927,067. Speaking the language of productivity, Helper’s book became a hit with Northern businessmen, turning many men of capital to the antislavery cause.

他计算得出，1850年，北方是更先进的社会，因为生产了351709703美元商品，而南方只有306927067美元。通过使用生产力标准，海尔珀的书在北方商人中大获成功，让许多资本家加入反奴事业中。

The Southern planter class, meanwhile, underwent a similar shift. When South Carolina’s governor, the planter and enslaver James Henry Hammond, sought to legitimize slavery in his famous 1858 “Cotton Is King” speech, he did so in part by declaring that “there is not a nation on the face of the earth, with any numerous population, that can compete with us in produce per capita … It amounts to $16.66 per head.”

同时，南方的种植园阶层也经历了类似转变。南卡州长、种植园主和蓄奴者詹姆士·亨利·哈蒙德1858年在著名的《棉花为王》的演讲中试图为蓄奴辩护，他宣称“地球上没有一个有人口众多的国家可以在人均产量上与我国媲美，我国每人16.66美元。”

What happened in the mid-19th century that led to this historically unprecedented pricing of progress? The short answer is straightforward enough: Capitalism happened. In the first few decades of the Republic, the United States developed into a commercial society, but not yet a fully capitalist one. 

十九世纪中叶发生了什么，导致这种给进步定价的历史性变革？简单说：资本主义发生了。共和国几十年间，美国发展成了一个商业社会，但还不是完全的资本主义。

One of the main elements that distinguishes capitalism from other forms of social and cultural organization is not just the existence of markets but also of capitalized investment, the act through which basic elements of society and life—including natural resources, technological discoveries, works of art, urban spaces, educational institutions, human beings, and nations—are transformed (or “capitalized”) into income-generating assets that are valued and allocated in accordance with their capacity to make money and yield future returns. 

资本主义区别于其他社会和文化组织形式的主要特征不仅在于它存在市场，还在于资本化的投资，通过这种行为，社会生活中的基本元素，包括自然资源、技术发现、艺术、城市空间、教育机构、人和国家，都被转变（或资本化）为可创收的资产，根据其创造金钱和获取未来收益的能力得到估价。

Save for a smattering of government-issued bonds and insurance companies, such a capitalization of everyday life was mostly absent until the mid-19th century. There existed few assets in early America through which one could invest wealth and earn an annual return.

十九世纪中叶以前，除了少量政府发行的债券和保险公司，日常生活中的资本化几乎不存在。美国早期，几乎没有个人可以投资并获得年收入的资产。

Capitalization, then, was crucial to the rise of economic indicators. As upper-class Americans in both the North and South began to plow their wealth into novel financial assets, they began to imagine not only their portfolio but their entire society as a capitalized investment and its inhabitants (free or enslaved) as inputs of human capital that could be plugged into output-maximizing equations of monetized growth.

资本化对经济指标的兴起至关重要。北方和南方的上层美国人开始通过新的金融资产致富，他们不仅谋划着投资组合，还把整个社会都想象成资本化投资，其居住者（自由的或是为奴的）都是人力资本投入，可以计入资本增殖的最大化公式。

In the North, such investments mostly took the form of urban real estate and companies that were building railroads. As capital flowed into these new channels, investors were putting money—via loans, bonds, stocks, banks, trusts, mortgages, and other financial instruments—into communities they might never even set foot in. 

在北方，这种投资主要采取城市房地产和铁路公司的形式。资本流入这些新渠道，投资者通过借贷、债券、股票、银行、信托、按揭等其他金融手段，将钱投在他们永远也不会涉足的领域中去。

As local businesspeople and producers lost significant power to these distant East Coast investors, a national business class came into being that cared less about moral statistics—say, the number of prostitutes in Peoria or drunks in Detroit—than about a town’s industrial output, population growth, real-estate prices, labor costs, railway traffic, and per-capita productivity.

当地的商人和生产者把重要的权力让渡给远在东海岸的投资人，于是国家商人阶层出现了，他们不关心道德统计，例如皮奥瑞亚的妓女或是底特律醉汉的数量，他们更关心城市的工业产出、人口增长、地产价格、劳动成本、铁路交通和人均生产力。

Capitalization was also behind the statistical shift in the South, only there it was less about investment in railroad stocks or urban real estate than in human bodies. Enslaved people had long been seen as pieces of property in the United States, but only in the antebellum Deep South did they truly become pieces of capital that could be mortgaged, rented, insured, and sold in highly liquid markets.

资本化也成为南方统计发生变革的原因，但在那里，主要并非对铁路股票或城市房地产的投资，关键在于人。奴隶在美国被视作资产，可只有在战前的南方腹地，他们成为真正的资本，可以在高度流动性市场上按揭、出租、保险和销售。

Viewing enslaved people first and foremost as income-yielding investments, planters began to keep careful track of their market output and value. Hammond, in his speech, had chosen to measure American prosperity in the same way that he valued, monitored, and disciplined those forced to work on his own cotton plantation.

种植园主将奴隶首先当做可以带来收入的投资，并开始认真关注市场产出和价值。哈蒙德在演讲中也用之评价、监测和管理在自己棉花农场中的被迫劳动者衡量美国繁荣。

As corporate consolidation and factories’ technological capabilities ramped up in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, additional techniques of capitalist quantification seeped from the business world into other facets of American society. By the Progressive Era, the logic of money could be found everywhere. “An eight-pound baby is worth, at birth, $362 a pound,” declared The New York Times on January 30th, 1910. 

随着镀金时代和进步主义时期，公司做大，工厂技术能力提高，资本主义新的量化技术从商界渗如美国社会各个方面。到进步主义时期，金钱逻辑当道。“八磅重的婴儿出生时，362美元一磅，”1910年1月30日《纽约时报》宣称。

“That is a child’s value as a potential wealth-producer. If he lives out the normal term of years, he can produce $2900 more wealth than it costs to rear him and maintain him as an adult.” The title of this article was “What the Baby Is Worth as a National Asset: Last Year’s Crop Reached a Value Estimated at $6,960,000,000.” 

“这是一个孩子作为潜在财富创造者的价值。如果他活到成年，可以多创造的价值比抚养他到成人的成本多2900美元”。这篇文章的题目是《作为一项国家资产，婴儿值多少钱：去年预计收获了69亿美元》。

During this era, an array of Progressive reformers priced not only babies but the annual social cost of everything from intemperance ($2 billion), the common cold ($21 a month per employee), typhoid ($271 million), and housewife labor ($7.5 billion), as well as the annual social benefit of skunks ($3 million), Niagara Falls ($122.5 million), and government health insurance ($3 billion).

在这一时期，一干进步主义的改革者给婴儿定价，还给几乎所有事算出个年社会成本，包括酗酒（20亿美元）、普通感冒（每雇员每月21美元）、家庭主妇（75亿美元），大麻烟（300万美元）、尼亚加拉瀑布（1.225亿美元）、政府健康保险（30亿美元）。

This particular way of thinking is still around, and hard to miss today in reports from the government, research organizations, and the media. For instance, researchers in this century have calculated the annual cost of excessive alcohol consumption ($223.5 billion) and of mental disorders ($467 billion), as well as the value of the average American life ($9.1 million according to one Obama-era government estimate, up from $6.8 million at one point during George W. Bush’s presidency).

这种特别的思想方法如今仍很流行，政府、研究机构和媒体的报告中很容易看到。例如，本世纪的研究者计算酒精过度消费的年成本（2235亿美元）和精神疾病的年成本（4670亿美元）以及美国人的平均价值（一项奥巴马执政时期的估计是910万美元，小布什党总统时只有680万美元）。

A century ago, money-based ideas of progress resonated most with business executives, most of whom were well-to-do white men. Measuring prosperity according to the Dow Jones Industrial Average (invented in 1896), manufacturing output, or per-capita wealth made a good deal of sense for America’s upper classes, since they were usually the ones who possessed the stocks, owned the factories, and held the wealth. 

一个世纪前，以钱为本的进步观主要在商界精英中流行，他们多数是富裕的白人。根据道琼斯工业平均指数（1896年创立）、制造业产出或人均财富来衡量繁荣在美国上层中使用广泛，因为他们通常有股票、有工厂、有钱。

As recognized by the Yale economist Irving Fisher, a man who rarely met a social problem he did not put a price on, economic statistics could be potent in early-20th-century political debates. In arguing for why people needed to be treated as “money-making machines,” Fisher explained how “newspapers showed a strong aversion to the harrowing side of the tuberculosis campaign but were always ready to ‘sit up and take notice’ when the cost of tuberculosis in dollars and cents was mentioned.”

正如耶鲁大学经济学家厄文·费舍尔观察，经济学统计在二十世纪初的政治讨论中强势起来，费舍尔几乎将所有社会问题都标了个价格。证明为什么人们需要被当做“赚钱机器”时，费舍尔解释“报纸强烈反感肺结核运动讲的悲惨故事，可如果肺结核的成本用美元计算后，他们就会‘仔细聆听’。”

John Rockefeller Jr., J.P. Morgan, and other millionaire capitalists also came to recognize the power of financial metrics in their era. They began to plan for a private research bureau that would focus on the pricing of everyday life.  Those plans came to fruition in the 1920s with the formation of the corporate-funded National Bureau of Economic Research. The private institution would go on to play a major role in the invention of Gross Net Product in the 1930s (and continues to operate today).

小洛克菲勒、J·P·摩根和其他巨富资本家也认识到他们时代中金钱尺度的权力。他们计划建立民建研究部门，关注日常生活中的定价。这些计划在二十世纪二十年代开花结果，成立了公司资助的国民经济研究局。私人机构在三十年代发明GNP一事上也发挥重要作用。

Most working-class Americans, though, were not as enthusiastic about the rise of economic indicators. This was largely because they believed the human experience to be “priceless” (a word that took off just as progress became conceptualized in terms of money) and because they (astutely) viewed such figures as tools that could be used to justify increased production quotas, more control over workers, or reduced wages. 

大多数美国工人阶级却对经济指标的兴起并不感冒。这主要因为他们相信人的经验是“无价的”（当进步被金钱概念化后，这个词才开始使用），因为他们精明地把这些数据看做可以用于为增加产量、加强控制工人和削减工资正名的工具。

Massachusetts labor activists fighting for the eight-hour workday spoke for many American workers when they said, in 1870, that “the true prosperity and abiding good of the commonwealth can only be learned, by placing money [on] one scale, and man [on another].”

为八小时工作时间奋斗的麻省劳工活动人士为许多美国工人撑腰，1870年，他们说，“真正的繁荣和持久性的共好只有同时把钱和人两个尺度择清楚。”

The assignment of prices to features of daily life, therefore, was never a foregone conclusion but rather a highly contested development. In the Gilded Age, some labor unions and Populist farmers succeeded in pushing state bureaus of labor statistics to offer up a series of alternative metrics that measured not economic growth or market output, but rather urban poverty, gender discrimination, leisure time, indebtedness, class mobility, rent-seeking behavior, and exploitation of workers. 

因此，给日常生活的各个方面标价并非注定如此，而是高度竞争的结果。在镀金时代，有工会和民粹主义农民成功推动州劳工统计部门提供另外一套尺度，不去衡量经济增长和市场产出，而监测城市贫困、性别歧视、业余时间、债务、阶层流动性、寻租行为和对工人的剥削。

The interests of businessmen, though, won the day more often than not, and by the mid-20th century economic indicators that focused on monetary output came to be seen as apolitical and objective.

可商人的利益多半要占上风，到二十世纪中叶，关注金钱产出的经济指标开始被认为是去政治和客观的。

That shift carried tremendous social ramifications: The necessary conditions for economic growth were frequently placed before the necessary conditions for individuals’ well-being. In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor, the efficiency expert who dreamed of measuring every human movement in terms of its cost to employers, bluntly articulated this reversal of ends and means: “In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.”

这种转变有着巨大的社会影响力：经济增长的必要条件经常被放在个人福祉的必要条件之前。1911年，效率专家弗雷德里克·温斯洛·泰勒梦想着用雇主成本衡量每个人的动作，他宣称这颠覆了目的和工具：“过去人是第一位的，未来系统必须是第一位的。”

In the end, men like Taylor got their wish. Since the mid-20th century—whether in the Keynesian 1950s or the neoliberal 1980s—economic indicators have promoted an idea of American society as a capital investment whose main goal, like that of any investment, is ever-increasing monetary growth. Americans have surely benefited materially from the remarkable economic growth over this period of time, an expansion wholly unique to capitalist societies. 

最终，泰勒这样的人如愿以偿。从二十世纪中叶起，不论凯恩斯主义盛行的五十年代或是新自由主义盛行的八十年代，经济指标推动了作为资本投资的美国社会，其主要目的与各种投资一样，都是永远增殖的钱。这一时期，美国当然从物质上受益于巨大经济增长，那种扩张对诸资本主义社会而言绝对是独一无二的。

Nevertheless, by making capital accumulation synonymous with progress, money-based metrics have turned human betterment into a secondary concern. By the early 21st century, American society’s top priority became its bottom line, net worth became synonymous with self-worth, and a billionaire businessman who repeatedly pointed to his own wealth as proof of his fitness for office was elected president.

然而，以金钱为本的尺度将资本积累等同于进步，把人类改善当做第二关切。到21世纪初，美国社会的首要任务成为其底线，身价成为了自我价值的同义词，一个总将个人财富当做自己适合从政证据的亿万富翁当选为总统。