Wealth & Money Quote by Alfred Marshall

Marshall is drawing a bright line between what people actually value and what economies are willing to count. The opening clause sounds expansive, almost democratic: if something satisfies human wants, it belongs in the universe of wealth. Then he pulls the rug. “But not all desirable things are reckoned as wealth” is a quiet indictment of accounting conventions masquerading as common sense.

The specific intent is methodological. As a late-19th-century economist trying to make the discipline more “scientific,” Marshall needs a workable definition of wealth that can be observed, priced, compared. The subtext: economics can’t study everything humans desire without collapsing into philosophy, psychology, or ethics. So the field narrows its lens to what can be exchanged, owned, and measured - typically marketable goods and services.

That narrowing is also a cultural confession. Victorian Britain is industrializing, urbanizing, monetizing daily life. Many of the most “desirable things” - leisure, clean air, trust, love, community status, household labor, even health before it becomes commodified - are vital but slippery. They don’t always enter ledgers, and when they do, they often show up distorted: priceless becomes “free,” care becomes “nonproductive,” nature becomes “externality.”

Why the line works is its dual register. Marshall reassures readers that economics isn’t blind to human satisfaction, then admits the discipline’s deliberate blindness to whole categories of value. It’s an early warning that GDP-style measures are choices, not mirrors: what we “reckon” as wealth reveals not just preferences, but power, institutions, and what a society has decided to make legible to markets.