Wealth & Money Quote by Alfred Marshall

Industrial capitalism loved to brag about abundance: more machines, more output, cheaper stuff. Marshall punctures that triumphal story with a sly reframing. If inventions expand human power over nature, then judging money by piles of commodities becomes a kind of optical illusion. Prices can fall because productivity rises, shelves can look fuller, and yet the social question that matters most - what it costs in human time and effort to live - may not improve in lockstep. Measuring money in labor, for "some purposes", is Marshall's careful way of saying: the factory age has changed the yardstick.

The intent is methodological and moral at once. Methodological, because he is addressing a classic problem for economists: how to compare "real" values over time when technology keeps changing what a pound can buy. Moral, because labor is where the gains and losses of progress land. Commodities are increasingly shaped by machines, global supply, and scale; labor remains stubbornly personal, finite, and politically charged. Using labor as a measure smuggles in a distributional question: who captures the dividend of invention - the consumer via cheaper goods, the owner via profits, or the worker via shorter hours and higher wages?

Context matters: Marshall is writing in the late 19th and early 20th century, when Britain was wrestling with industrial productivity, urban poverty, and the emerging language of "standard of living". His subtext is a warning against mistaking technological prowess for human welfare. If we want to know whether progress is actually making lives better, count not just goods, but the hours it takes to earn them.