"The most interesting thing about the idea of money is that it makes it possible to measure something in previous ages we couldn't be sure about, and that something is power"
About this Quote
Money, in Moran's telling, isn’t valuable because it buys things; it’s valuable because it turns influence into arithmetic. The line has the cool, slightly ominous clarity of a science-fiction writer looking at society the way an engineer looks at a system: find the hidden variable, make it legible, then watch what people do once it is.
The intent is to demystify money by demoting it from moral fetish to measurement tool. In “previous ages,” power was real but slippery: a lord’s authority, a priest’s sway, a patron’s network. You could feel it, fear it, benefit from it, but you couldn’t easily compare it across people or institutions. Money collapses those qualitative forces into a single, portable metric. It doesn’t create power so much as standardize its exchange rate.
The subtext is the uncomfortable part: measurement changes behavior. Once power can be priced, it can be traded, accumulated, diversified, laundered, inherited, hedged. The quote quietly implies that capitalism’s true innovation isn’t markets for goods; it’s markets for leverage. That’s why money is so often mistaken for virtue or intelligence: numbers look like proof. They aren’t proof of goodness; they’re proof of capacity to command outcomes.
Contextually, this lands in a late-20th-century moment obsessed with quantification - GDP, “net worth,” cost-benefit governance - and with the creeping suspicion that democracy can be audited and outbid. Moran’s point doesn’t ask you to hate money. It asks you to notice what it reveals: not our needs, but our hierarchy.
The intent is to demystify money by demoting it from moral fetish to measurement tool. In “previous ages,” power was real but slippery: a lord’s authority, a priest’s sway, a patron’s network. You could feel it, fear it, benefit from it, but you couldn’t easily compare it across people or institutions. Money collapses those qualitative forces into a single, portable metric. It doesn’t create power so much as standardize its exchange rate.
The subtext is the uncomfortable part: measurement changes behavior. Once power can be priced, it can be traded, accumulated, diversified, laundered, inherited, hedged. The quote quietly implies that capitalism’s true innovation isn’t markets for goods; it’s markets for leverage. That’s why money is so often mistaken for virtue or intelligence: numbers look like proof. They aren’t proof of goodness; they’re proof of capacity to command outcomes.
Contextually, this lands in a late-20th-century moment obsessed with quantification - GDP, “net worth,” cost-benefit governance - and with the creeping suspicion that democracy can be audited and outbid. Moran’s point doesn’t ask you to hate money. It asks you to notice what it reveals: not our needs, but our hierarchy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Money |
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