It s the American way, isn t it. Fiat money is the fundamental measure of economic success, although not necessarily cultural or aesthetic fulfillment.
Capitalism works that way.
Society can organize around this and solve common problems and satisfy any historian. And making money becomes the simplest motive. Within the world of legitimate and legal activity, there is an enormous amount of symbolic activity paper pushing and leveraging of financial structures distinctly related to real wealth land, labor, animals, even information. So much economic activity, however, is driven by short-term financial success stock prices vary enormously with established companies on whether they make earnings. For startups, however, there have sometimes been no earnings expectations at all until investors or venture capitalists find out that a dot-com is just a gimmick with no business model and a superficial, silly idea.