Reviewed by: The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life by Eli Cook Sean Patrick Adams (bio) The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life. By Eli Cook. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 368. $29.95 cloth) These days, Americans constantly measure their lives. They track their steps and calories, college board scores, frequent flyer miles, credit card awards points, and days until retirement. In economic terms, Americans swim in an even deeper sea of statistics. Credit ratings, [End Page 620] income tax brackets, financial goals, insurance metrics, and student loans all take the quantitative assessment of humanity for granted. How did we get here? Eli Cook attempts to answer this very important question in his fascinating book, The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life. As it turns out, we were not always sized up by statistics; the process evolved slowly, and with fits and starts, from the Colonial Era through the early-twentieth century. In demonstrating the contingency of this process, Cook offers a number of insights that make this work well worth a read for its careful reconstruction of how this quantitative assessment brought the logic of capitalism to everyday life in the United States. Cook's aim is to examine the "capitalization of everyday American life" that came along with the development of American capitalism (p. 5). He begins The Pricing of Progress, however, in England with the enclosure movement of the Early Modern Era, before crossing the Atlantic to use Alexander Hamilton's experience as the first Secretary of the Treasury to introduce the American origins of this drive to measure economic progress. Hamilton failed in his efforts, Cook argues, because the Early Republic was "decisively non-capitalist" in spirit (p. 100). This does not mean a rejection of market principles, but instead a resistance to equate progress with economic growth. The turning point occurs with the rising use of statistical indicators used by religious and social reformers to track the impact of problems like alcoholism, poverty, disease, and slavery—this last factor being the most controversial use of quantitative logic—upon the health of the nation. Moral statistics became an important predecessor to the rampant pricing that accompanied the rise of American capitalism because they "succeeded in injecting quantified measures in to everyday American discourse, newspapers, politics, government bureaucracies, and civil society" (p. 103). Once inured to a blizzard of data measuring moral and social progress, Americans found the pricing of their lives less imposing. Cook traces the efforts of Freeman Hunt, the tireless editor of the statistic-laden Hunt's Merchant Magazine from 1839 to 1858, as well as fellow compilers of economic statistics [End Page 621] such as Hinton Helper, James DeBow, and Archibald Russell, to demonstrate how the normalization of quantitative measures occurred. Following the Civil War, several prominent public figures took up the cause of statistical measure of progress. Carroll Wright and the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics measured wages and living conditions, while the industrialist/political writer Edward Atkinson wrote, among many other things, the value of nutritional cost accounting. By 1910, the New York Times used data derived by the Yale economist Irving Fisher to announce that a newborn baby was worth $362 per pound. Americans hardly protested, as Cook concludes, by this time the "the pricing of everyday life—and everyday Americans—was a frequent occurrence, as market productivity became a consensus benchmark of that widely heralded Progressive dream, 'efficiency.'" (p. 223) Cook uses the episodic portraits of individuals to great effect in The Pricing of Progress. This is not a comprehensive study of the role of statistics in American life, but instead an inquiry into how progress came to be wrapped up with economic growth. The culmination of that project came with the popularity of GDP as the ultimate measure of a nation's "worth." Cook deals with that phenomenon in a brief epilogue, but The Pricing of Progress provides much more than a historical precedent to that universal statistic. As a broad inquiry into how the values of capitalism became hard-wired into American life, this book offers a provocative challenge for...