Blinded by money

Reading newspapers nowadays, I am struck by how much we rely on monetary measures to judge how well we are doing as a society. The market and GDP are up, things are good. Market's down, bad. Surely incomes do impact people's well being, but our reliance on money as a measuring stick can obfuscate what we really care about in public policy. Money to me is just the means to the goods we purchase- for whom money is an an end (the archetypal miser), we call pathological.

All this is obvious, but let's take a look at a recent Steven Pearlstein article in the post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/19/AR2008081902703.html

The topic is Central Park, and while praising the landscape enhancements to the park, Pearlstein offers the following rationale:

"The Central Park Conservancy calculates that it invested $350 million over the past 20 years to restore the park to its former glory and requires $37 million a year to maintain it. That may sound like a lot of money, but when compared with the enhanced property values in the surrounding neighborhoods, the increased tourism it has helped to spawn and its contribution to making the city a more attractive place to live, my guess is that the return on investment easily equals that of the average hedge fund. "

Let's examine this for a moment. Why do we think that property values increased around the park and that tourism increased? Presumably that's because people enjoy spending time in the park. Home values and tourist dollars are merely a symptom of the value people place on enjoyment, not the REAL value itself. Are we to think that if a tree falls in Central Park and nobody was there to sell it as lumber that it didn't really happen?

Yes, estimating monetary outcomes can help us make decisions about public investment. Let's just not lose sight of the fact that what we really care about is not money, rather the enjoyment that we get from among other things art, culture, family, and nature- and that ready metrics aren't available to value all of these things.