A recurring theme in my academic writing—across financial compliance, bankruptcy, and criminal justice—is that governance depends on legibility: the ability to classify, measure, and compare. It was the late James C. Scott and his books Seeing Like a State and Against the Grain that put a name to an action I had observed and wrangled with for years. Despite being nearly 30 years old, I hadn’t really been exposed to Seeing Like a State until just a couple of years ago. Those works helped to finally put the pieces together.
I was raised by a staunch Libertarian. Within those circles, commodity theories of money are nearly a foregone conclusion. The late David Graeber, whom I had the pleasure of meeting during my time at the LSE, broke that spell. Then Scott’s work came along and suddenly money finally ‘clicked’ for me.
To make something administrable, you first have to make it countable. You have to sort messy reality into categories that can be recorded, compared, and processed. And because reality is messy, those categories always distort. They leave residue. They incentivize gaming. They generate “edge cases” that become entire industries.
This is why so many modern regimes expand even when their effectiveness is marginal. The systems they produce don’t persist because they’re effective at what they claim to do. They persist because they produce outputs that are legible to institutions: reports, flags, metrics, compliance artifacts, risk scores, audit trails. Those outputs become the basis for more policy, more enforcement, more funding, more staffing, more rules. The machine learns to justify itself in its own language.
In that sense, legibility can function like a kind of ratchet: each expansion in classification and measurement creates new frictions, new evasions, new errors, and new demands for new classifications. The system grows by responding to problems it partly generates.
That dynamic—legibility as infrastructure and as a driver of institutional persistence—shows up in money too. When a monetary order scales, it does so through the same machinery: categories, accounts, enforcement, and the political struggle over what counts. And it creates the same holes, the same frictions, and the same workarounds. Meanwhile, the powers that be make new demands for more machinery in response.
Rinse and repeat for a few thousand years and you get…whatever this mess we call money is.
D.L. White 