What If Capitalism Had A Different Metric Than More Stuff ?

Capitalism has many meanings to many people through many different periods of time, as this wikipedia article on Capitalism suggests. 

The central "metric", or measuring stick in Capitalism seems to be money, or sometimes in a more abstract sense power, such as the power that having lots of money brings someone. But mainly it's the "more is better" metric, expanded to whatever culture it is implemented in.

I would pose this question then. If getting money is the measure of success, what happens as people's values change ?

Spirtitualism, Fundamentalism, other newer values

As some cultures are becoming more awash in money, money is losing it's relative value and being replaced by other things even more important to people than money. Religious fundamentalism here in the United States and in Muslem countries is just one such example, many are eschewing wealth in favor of religious or spiritual objectives.

If capitalism then remains the same, except the means of measuring one's success changes to something other than money, can capitalism still function the same fantastic way, and acheive the same great results ?

Or does changing the means of measuring success change the essence of the capitalistic system itself ?

How would you measure attainment of more abstract goals ?

• Count the churches ?
• Facial recognition software to detect the depth or breadth of people's smiles ?
• Measure types and quantities of peptides being sent through the body in response to daily events ?
• Ask people if they are happy or fulfilled ?
• Count the people who are behaving in a way that Santa Clause or Mohamed or Jerry Fallwell would approve of ?
• Test people on their ability to recite religious verses ?

Obviously I am attempting to use examples that are a little bit silly to stretch the arguments. If people are going to pursue these great benefits though, wouldn't it make sense to consider measuring them and see about how we can maximize our pursuit of these excellent objectives ?

It would be interesting to see this modeled out, and even to enage in how one would model it out ? In an economic model it's easy because you just measure money.

Does Well Being Aggregate ? Is More more ?

The other nice thing about finances as something to model is it works in a straight linear fashion. If I have $100 today and it doubles then I have $200.

If I have well being today, then can I get more ? Does it even aggregate ? If so how.

• Would it double if my favorite brother got well being too ?
• Would it double if I got twice as long in a well being state ?

Money Capitalism vs [well being] Capitalism ?

So then what if there was a way to model capitalism with a different measuring stick ? Would people move to the newer system now that they have a way to measure success other than money ?

What would happen between the people who had different value systems - money capitalists vs [well being] capitalists ? Would they become antagonist or complementary or both or neither ?

Could you use the same tools in each or would whole new tool sets and institutions become necessary ? Would federal financial statistics be augmented by [well being] statistics ?

Lots of new questions.

Silly ideas, to be sure. So do we dump the whole concept and just go back to money as the only reliable measuring stick ?

Could be.