"The price of every thing rises and falls from time to time and place to place; and with every such change the purchasing power of money changes so far as that thing goes"
About this Quote
Marshall is quietly puncturing the comforting fiction that money is a stable yardstick. His point isn’t just that prices fluctuate; it’s that “money” itself becomes a moving target because its power is always defined in relation to particular goods, in particular places, at particular moments. In other words: inflation isn’t a single weather report. It’s microclimates.
The line works because it refuses the dramatic vocabulary of crisis while smuggling in a radical implication. If purchasing power “changes so far as that thing goes,” then there is no one true cost of living, no single “real wage,” no universal experience of prosperity. A rise in bread prices is not equivalent to a rise in rent, and neither is experienced equally by a tenant, a landowner, or a factory worker. Marshall’s seemingly mild phrasing is a rebuke to sloppy averages and headline-grabbing indices that pretend a representative basket can stand in for actual households.
Context matters: writing in an era of industrial expansion, uneven urbanization, and periodic financial shocks, Marshall is laying groundwork for modern price theory and welfare economics. He’s also defending economics as an empirical discipline: watch the thing itself, watch the place, watch the time. The subtext is methodological and political at once. If money’s meaning is relational, then policy arguments that treat “the pound” as fixed are suspect, and debates about wages, poverty, and “fair” contracts have to grapple with shifting real conditions rather than nominal figures.
It’s a sentence that sounds like bookkeeping and lands like ethics.
The line works because it refuses the dramatic vocabulary of crisis while smuggling in a radical implication. If purchasing power “changes so far as that thing goes,” then there is no one true cost of living, no single “real wage,” no universal experience of prosperity. A rise in bread prices is not equivalent to a rise in rent, and neither is experienced equally by a tenant, a landowner, or a factory worker. Marshall’s seemingly mild phrasing is a rebuke to sloppy averages and headline-grabbing indices that pretend a representative basket can stand in for actual households.
Context matters: writing in an era of industrial expansion, uneven urbanization, and periodic financial shocks, Marshall is laying groundwork for modern price theory and welfare economics. He’s also defending economics as an empirical discipline: watch the thing itself, watch the place, watch the time. The subtext is methodological and political at once. If money’s meaning is relational, then policy arguments that treat “the pound” as fixed are suspect, and debates about wages, poverty, and “fair” contracts have to grapple with shifting real conditions rather than nominal figures.
It’s a sentence that sounds like bookkeeping and lands like ethics.
Quote Details
| Topic | Money |
|---|---|
| Source | Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (first published 1890). |
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