Wealth & Money Quote by Gregory Bateson

Bateson is poking a sharp stick into one of modern life’s quietest, most stubborn superstitions: that money isn’t just useful, it’s self-justifying. Calling it “transitively valued” is scientist-speak with a philosophical edge. Money doesn’t matter because it’s lovable or nourishing in itself; it matters because it points elsewhere. It’s a token whose meaning is always deferred - to security, status, autonomy, pleasure, survival. That detour is the trick: once value is routed through money, the token starts to look like the destination.

The second sentence - “supposedly always better” - drips with controlled skepticism. Bateson isn’t denying that money solves problems; he’s warning about a cognitive slide from “money can get me X” to “money is X.” Transitive value becomes addictive because it’s clean and countable. Compared to the messy, qualitative work of figuring out what you actually want, more money offers a universal shortcut. It collapses different needs into one metric, letting you avoid the harder question of sufficiency.

Context matters here: Bateson’s broader work in systems theory and cybernetics is obsessed with feedback loops and category mistakes. Treating money as an always-good substance is a classic loop: accumulation becomes its own reinforcement, untethered from the real-world ends it was meant to serve. The subtext is ecological as much as personal. When societies mistake the symbol for the system it’s supposed to regulate, they optimize for the symbol - and end up impoverishing the very life it was meant to support.