These newsletter fragments from Monocle, ARTNews, The Economist, UBS Insights and Goldman Sachs from December 18-24, 2025—spanning design criticism, art market analysis, financial forecasting, and geopolitical commentary—present a peculiar archive of late capitalist consciousness at year’s end. They reveal how contemporary society simultaneously measures and creates value across seemingly disparate domains: the auction price of a Joan Mitchell painting, China’s export statistics, the “liveability” of cities, even the optimal strategy for surviving Christmas festivities. What unites these diverse acts of quantification is a deeper epistemological anxiety about legibility itself—the perennial modern question of how we know what we know, and how we value what we value.

Massimo Vignelli’s observation, quoted in Monocle’s meditation on calendar design, captures this tension perfectly: “Dimension is physical, while scale is mental” (Newsletters December 26, 2025). This distinction between the measurable and the perceived runs through all these documents like a golden thread, revealing how our instruments of measurement—whether GDP forecasts, auction records, or Human Development Indices—simultaneously illuminate and obscure the phenomena they claim to capture.

The Monocle newsletter’s opening meditation on the Stendig calendar offers an unexpectedly profound entry point into understanding how modernity structures experience. Yvonne Xu’s reflection on switching from the monumental, tear-away Stendig calendar to the more compact V Calendar, only to return to the former, dramatizes what Walter Benjamin (1968) called the “dialectical image”—a constellation where past and present suddenly coalesce into legibility. She writes: “when you see all 365 days laid out on a single page, one year doesn’t seem very long—so I adjusted my ambitions accordingly” (Newsletters December 26, 2025).

This compression of temporal experience mirrors what David Harvey (1990) theorized as “time-space compression” under late capitalism, where accelerating circulation of capital, information, and commodities fundamentally transforms human perception of duration and distance. Yet Xu’s ultimate return to the Stendig calendar suggests resistance to this compression—a desire for what Benjamin (1968) called “homogeneous, empty time” to be replaced with something more substantial, more dramatically present. The calendar’s physical monumentality forces “friction,” as Xu notes: “it’s precisely this friction that helps us see what we value, what we will adapt and what we will accommodate” (Newsletters December 26, 2025).

This friction finds its economic analogue in Goldman Sachs’s forecasts for 2026, which project global GDP growth of 2.8% while acknowledging fundamental disconnects between measurable economic indicators and lived experience (Goldman Sachs, December 19, 2025). The financial newsletters obsessively quantify—equity valuations, export percentages, inflation decimals—yet simultaneously acknowledge uncertainty through hedge words: “sturdy growth,” “stagnant jobs,” “stable prices.” Like Xu’s calendar, these metrics both reveal and constrain, offering precision while admitting to systematic blindness about what truly matters.

ARTnews’s coverage of Joan Mitchell’s rising but still comparatively modest auction prices exemplifies what Pierre Bourdieu (1984) analyzed as the complex conversion rates between economic capital and cultural capital. Mitchell’s auction record of $29.2 million, while impressive, remains dramatically below her male Abstract Expressionist contemporaries—Mark Rothko at $86.9 million, Willem de Kooning at $68.9 million, Jackson Pollock at $61.2 million (ARTnews, December 18, 2025). As adviser Erica Samuels asks: “why isn’t Mitchell playing with Willem de Kooning? They’re basically equal colleagues in the Abstract Expressionist group” (ARTnews, December 18, 2025).

This persistent gender-based valuation gap illuminates what Nancy Fraser (2013) terms “capitalism’s crisis of care”—the systematic undervaluation of forms of labor and production associated with femininity. The art market’s pricing mechanisms claim to measure aesthetic merit and historical significance objectively, yet they reproduce and naturalize gendered hierarchies. Mitchell’s “unique intensity and persistence” and “dedication to pursuing her own direction regardless of trends” (ARTnews, December 18, 2025) paradoxically work against market valorization in a system that rewards masculine narratives of heroic individualism and market dominance.

Arjun Appadurai’s (1986) concept of “tournaments of value” helps explain this phenomenon. Auction houses don’t merely discover value; they theatrically produce it through ritualized competition. The gendered scripts embedded in these tournaments—the mythology of the tortured male genius, the romantic narrative of self-destructive creativity—systematically exclude female artists from achieving comparable prices, regardless of aesthetic achievement. As Appadurai observes, “what is at issue in these tourneys is not just status, rank, fame, or reputation of actors, but the disposition of the central tokens of value in the society in question” (p. 21).

The luxury goods market, prominently featured across these newsletters, extends this logic. Monocle’s Christmas gift recommendations—Tivoli Audio speakers, Monoware coffee cups, Sugiyama Kinzoku kettles—participate in what Thorstein Veblen (1899/2007) called “conspicuous consumption,” where objects function primarily as markers of taste and cultural competence. Yet the editorial voice carefully distances itself from crude materialism, emphasizing craft, tradition, “timeless treats” (Newsletters December 26, 2025). This represents what David Brooks (2000) termed “Bobos in Paradise”—the bourgeois bohemian synthesis where consumption becomes simultaneously an aesthetic and ethical practice, reconciling countercultural values with capitalist accumulation.

Both The Economist and Goldman Sachs newsletters converge on a fundamental recognition: 2025 marked a decisive shift in the global economic order, with China’s export dominance reaching unprecedented levels. Goldman Sachs Research predicts Chinese exports will “rise to the highest share of global GDP on record of any single economy,” driven by “Chinese leadership’s determination to drive growth through industrial production and exports” (Goldman Sachs, December 19, 2025). The Economist is even more direct, noting that despite India and Indonesia’s struggles, “China’s one-party system marches ahead,” leading one observer to suggest we should start “calling it what it really is: China’s century” (The Economist, December 22, 2025).

This represents what Giovanni Arrighi (2007) theorized as a fundamental shift in the “long twentieth century”—a transition between hegemonic powers and accumulation regimes. Arrighi presciently argued that China’s rise represented not merely a transfer of manufacturing capacity but a potential departure from the financialized Anglo-American model of capitalism. The newsletter evidence supports this: while Western economies struggle with “quiet quitting” labor markets and tepid growth, China demonstrates the capacity to simultaneously dominate global manufacturing while building out cutting-edge AI infrastructure.

Yet this triumphalism coexists with recognition of profound vulnerabilities. Goldman Sachs notes that “large parts of China’s domestic economy remain weak,” with the property sector producing “a 1.5 percentage point drag on GDP growth” (Goldman Sachs, December 19, 2025). This internal contradiction recalls Karl Polanyi’s (1944/2001) analysis of the “double movement”—the tendency of market expansion to generate its own social resistance and instability. China’s export-led growth strategy, however successful externally, leaves its domestic economy structurally imbalanced, dependent on external demand in ways that create systemic vulnerability.

The geopolitical implications cascade through multiple domains covered in these newsletters. The Economist’s report on Japan’s increasingly fraught relationship with China over Taiwan, the British Museum’s “cultural diplomacy” through lending artifacts to India, even Monocle’s celebration of Japanese craft traditions—all these represent what Joseph Nye (1990) termed “soft power,” the capacity to shape preferences and perceptions rather than coerce through military or economic force. Yet as The Economist observes, “China has held back from encouraging consumer boycotts—for now,” suggesting the fragility of these cultural exchanges in an era of intensifying great power competition (The Economist, December 22, 2025).

Subscribe

The newsletters’ scattered references to climate and migration issues reveal what Rob Nixon (2011) called “slow violence”—catastrophic processes that unfold gradually, resistant to dramatic narrative framing. The Economist notes that “the world’s first climate refugees will arrive in Australia in 2026” from Tuvalu (The Economist, December 20, 2025), marking a bureaucratic milestone that obscures the immense suffering and displacement already underway. Similarly, Monocle’s meditation on European housing inefficiency and heating costs—noting that “Britain’s energy prices are among the highest in Europe” while having “some of the continent’s least energy-efficient homes” (Newsletters December 26, 2025)—frames climate adaptation as primarily a technical and policy problem rather than a fundamental crisis of social organization.

This rhetorical strategy exemplifies what Naomi Klein (2014) analyzed as climate discourse’s tendency toward “magical thinking”—the fantasy that market mechanisms and incremental reforms can address systemic transformations. The UBS newsletter’s discussion of geothermal energy “going from niche to necessary” (The Economist, December 20, 2025) participates in this fantasy, suggesting technological innovation will solve problems that are fundamentally political and distributional.

The New Zealand emigration crisis, covered by The Economist, provides a microcosm of these dynamics. “Record numbers of New Zealanders are hopping ‘across the ditch’ to live and work in Australia” despite New Zealand ranking 17th globally in human development (The Economist, December 21, 2025). This internal migration within the Anglophone Pacific, like the anticipated Tuvaluan climate refugees, reveals what Ulrich Beck (1992) called the “risk society”—where individuals increasingly bear responsibility for navigating systemic vulnerabilities through personal mobility and optimization strategies.

ARTnews’s coverage of the British Museum’s lending program exemplifies the contradictions of institutional decolonization under neoliberalism. The Museum frames its transfer of “80 significant Greek and Egyptian objects” to Mumbai’s museum as “decolonization through collaboration rather than restitution” (ARTnews, December 18, 2025). Director Nicholas Cullinan explicitly rejects return of looted artifacts, instead promoting “long-term loans as a constructive alternative to disputes over ownership” and describing museums as practicing “cultural diplomacy” (ARTnews, December 18, 2025).

This represents what Sara Ahmed (2012) analyzed as “non-performativity”—institutional speech acts that name problems while actively preventing their resolution. By reframing restitution as “cultural diplomacy,” the British Museum transforms a question of justice into one of international relations, preserving its collection while appearing progressive. The Brighton and Hove Museums’ call to “decolonize Santa,” criticized for questioning “who gave Santa authority to evaluate children across all societies” (ARTnews, December 22, 2025), extends this logic to absurdity, suggesting how decolonial discourse can be instrumentalized for purposes far removed from material redress.

James Clifford’s (1997) concept of museums as “contact zones” helps clarify what’s at stake. Museums are not neutral repositories but active sites where asymmetric power relations are negotiated, reinforced, or occasionally challenged. The British Museum’s lending program maintains the fundamental power asymmetry—British curators still determine what goes where, for how long, under what conditions—while deploying the rhetoric of partnership and mutual benefit. This parallels what David Harvey (2005) called “accumulation by dispossession,” where neo-colonial relations are reproduced through seemingly progressive institutional arrangements.

These newsletters, taken together, reveal a late capitalist culture obsessed with measurement yet increasingly uncertain about what its metrics actually mean. Goldman Sachs can project GDP growth to two decimal places while acknowledging fundamental uncertainty about consumer behavior, labor markets, and geopolitical stability. ARTnews can track Joan Mitchell’s auction prices with precision while struggling to explain persistent gender disparities. The Economist can rank countries by “liveability” while New Zealanders vote with their feet, seeking something that indices cannot capture.

This suggests that despite—or perhaps because of—our sophisticated quantitative apparatus, we increasingly confront what Michael Polanyi (1966) called “tacit knowledge,” understanding that resists codification and measurement. The friction that Yvonne Xu celebrates in her monumental Stendig calendar, the “unique intensity” that distinguishes Joan Mitchell’s work, the “soft power” that shapes geopolitical outcomes—these qualitative dimensions persist despite their resistance to our metrics.

As we navigate what Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) called the “age of humans”—where human activity has become a geological force—perhaps our obsession with measurement represents not confidence but anxiety, an attempt to make legible processes that exceed our conceptual frameworks. The newsletters’ year-end timing is apt: December’s ritual of retrospection and forecasting dramatizes modernity’s temporal structure, always looking backward to quantify what happened and forward to predict what’s coming, never quite inhabiting the present that Xu’s calendar demands we see.

The question, then, is not whether our measurements are accurate—they often are, within their domains—but whether we’re measuring what matters. In an era of climate emergency, democratic backsliding, and intensifying inequality, the newsletters’ relentless focus on market valuations, export statistics, and liveability indices may represent a form of what Fredric Jameson (1991) called “the political unconscious”—an inability to imagine radical alternatives, even as our current arrangements visibly fail to sustain either human flourishing or planetary stability.

Share

Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.

Appadurai, A. (1986). Introduction: Commodities and the politics of value. In A. Appadurai (Ed.), The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective (pp. 3-63). Cambridge University Press.

Arrighi, G. (2007). Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the twenty-first century. Verso.

Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity (M. Ritter, Trans.). Sage. (Original work published 1986)

Benjamin, W. (1968). Theses on the philosophy of history. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations: Essays and reflections (pp. 253-264). Schocken Books.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1979)

Brooks, D. (2000). Bobos in paradise: The new upper class and how they got there. Simon & Schuster.

Chakrabarty, D. (2009). The climate of history: Four theses. Critical Inquiry, 35(2), 197-222.

Clifford, J. (1997). Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Harvard University Press.

Fraser, N. (2013). Fortunes of feminism: From state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis. New Left Review, II(80), 151-156.

Goldman Sachs. (2025, December 19). Briefings Newsletter. Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.

Harvey, D. (1990). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Blackwell.

Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.

Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Duke University Press.

Klein, N. (2014). This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the climate. Simon & Schuster.

Newsletters December 26, 2025. (2025). [Document compilation including Monocle, ARTnews, UBS Insights, The Economist, and Goldman Sachs newsletters].

Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.

Nye, J. S. (1990). Soft power. Foreign Policy, (80), 153-171.

Polanyi, K. (2001). The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1944)

Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. University of Chicago Press.

The Economist. (2025, December 17-24). The Economist Today [Newsletter series].

Veblen, T. (2007). The theory of the leisure class. Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1899)

[Written, Researched, and Edited by Pablo Markin. Some parts of the text have been produced with the aid of Claude, Anthropic, tools (December 26, 2025). The featured image has been generated in Canva (December 26, 2025).]

[Support the Open Access Blogs: https://openaccessblogs.gumroad.com/l/openaccessblogssupport.]

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Pablo Markin (December 26, 2025). The Metrics of Modernity: Reflections on Value, Time, and Power in the Late Anthropocene. Open Culture.

These newsletter fragments from Monocle, ARTNews, The Economist, UBS Insights and Goldman Sachs from December 18-24, 2025—spanning design criticism, art market analysis, financial forecasting, and geopolitical commentary—present a peculiar archive of late capitalist consciousness at year’s end. They reveal how contemporary society simultaneously measures and creates value across seemingly disparate domains: the auction price of a Joan Mitchell painting, China’s export statistics, the “liveability” of cities, even the optimal strategy for surviving Christmas festivities. What unites these diverse acts of quantification is a deeper epistemological anxiety about legibility itself—the perennial modern question of how we know what we know, and how we value what we value.

Massimo Vignelli’s observation, quoted in Monocle’s meditation on calendar design, captures this tension perfectly: “Dimension is physical, while scale is mental” (Newsletters December 26, 2025). This distinction between the measurable and the perceived runs through all these documents like a golden thread, revealing how our instruments of measurement—whether GDP forecasts, auction records, or Human Development Indices—simultaneously illuminate and obscure the phenomena they claim to capture.

The Monocle newsletter’s opening meditation on the Stendig calendar offers an unexpectedly profound entry point into understanding how modernity structures experience. Yvonne Xu’s reflection on switching from the monumental, tear-away Stendig calendar to the more compact V Calendar, only to return to the former, dramatizes what Walter Benjamin (1968) called the “dialectical image”—a constellation where past and present suddenly coalesce into legibility. She writes: “when you see all 365 days laid out on a single page, one year doesn’t seem very long—so I adjusted my ambitions accordingly” (Newsletters December 26, 2025).

This compression of temporal experience mirrors what David Harvey (1990) theorized as “time-space compression” under late capitalism, where accelerating circulation of capital, information, and commodities fundamentally transforms human perception of duration and distance. Yet Xu’s ultimate return to the Stendig calendar suggests resistance to this compression—a desire for what Benjamin (1968) called “homogeneous, empty time” to be replaced with something more substantial, more dramatically present. The calendar’s physical monumentality forces “friction,” as Xu notes: “it’s precisely this friction that helps us see what we value, what we will adapt and what we will accommodate” (Newsletters December 26, 2025).

This friction finds its economic analogue in Goldman Sachs’s forecasts for 2026, which project global GDP growth of 2.8% while acknowledging fundamental disconnects between measurable economic indicators and lived experience (Goldman Sachs, December 19, 2025). The financial newsletters obsessively quantify—equity valuations, export percentages, inflation decimals—yet simultaneously acknowledge uncertainty through hedge words: “sturdy growth,” “stagnant jobs,” “stable prices.” Like Xu’s calendar, these metrics both reveal and constrain, offering precision while admitting to systematic blindness about what truly matters.

ARTnews’s coverage of Joan Mitchell’s rising but still comparatively modest auction prices exemplifies what Pierre Bourdieu (1984) analyzed as the complex conversion rates between economic capital and cultural capital. Mitchell’s auction record of $29.2 million, while impressive, remains dramatically below her male Abstract Expressionist contemporaries—Mark Rothko at $86.9 million, Willem de Kooning at $68.9 million, Jackson Pollock at $61.2 million (ARTnews, December 18, 2025). As adviser Erica Samuels asks: “why isn’t Mitchell playing with Willem de Kooning? They’re basically equal colleagues in the Abstract Expressionist group” (ARTnews, December 18, 2025).

This persistent gender-based valuation gap illuminates what Nancy Fraser (2013) terms “capitalism’s crisis of care”—the systematic undervaluation of forms of labor and production associated with femininity. The art market’s pricing mechanisms claim to measure aesthetic merit and historical significance objectively, yet they reproduce and naturalize gendered hierarchies. Mitchell’s “unique intensity and persistence” and “dedication to pursuing her own direction regardless of trends” (ARTnews, December 18, 2025) paradoxically work against market valorization in a system that rewards masculine narratives of heroic individualism and market dominance.

Arjun Appadurai’s (1986) concept of “tournaments of value” helps explain this phenomenon. Auction houses don’t merely discover value; they theatrically produce it through ritualized competition. The gendered scripts embedded in these tournaments—the mythology of the tortured male genius, the romantic narrative of self-destructive creativity—systematically exclude female artists from achieving comparable prices, regardless of aesthetic achievement. As Appadurai observes, “what is at issue in these tourneys is not just status, rank, fame, or reputation of actors, but the disposition of the central tokens of value in the society in question” (p. 21).

The luxury goods market, prominently featured across these newsletters, extends this logic. Monocle’s Christmas gift recommendations—Tivoli Audio speakers, Monoware coffee cups, Sugiyama Kinzoku kettles—participate in what Thorstein Veblen (1899/2007) called “conspicuous consumption,” where objects function primarily as markers of taste and cultural competence. Yet the editorial voice carefully distances itself from crude materialism, emphasizing craft, tradition, “timeless treats” (Newsletters December 26, 2025). This represents what David Brooks (2000) termed “Bobos in Paradise”—the bourgeois bohemian synthesis where consumption becomes simultaneously an aesthetic and ethical practice, reconciling countercultural values with capitalist accumulation.

Both The Economist and Goldman Sachs newsletters converge on a fundamental recognition: 2025 marked a decisive shift in the global economic order, with China’s export dominance reaching unprecedented levels. Goldman Sachs Research predicts Chinese exports will “rise to the highest share of global GDP on record of any single economy,” driven by “Chinese leadership’s determination to drive growth through industrial production and exports” (Goldman Sachs, December 19, 2025). The Economist is even more direct, noting that despite India and Indonesia’s struggles, “China’s one-party system marches ahead,” leading one observer to suggest we should start “calling it what it really is: China’s century” (The Economist, December 22, 2025).

This represents what Giovanni Arrighi (2007) theorized as a fundamental shift in the “long twentieth century”—a transition between hegemonic powers and accumulation regimes. Arrighi presciently argued that China’s rise represented not merely a transfer of manufacturing capacity but a potential departure from the financialized Anglo-American model of capitalism. The newsletter evidence supports this: while Western economies struggle with “quiet quitting” labor markets and tepid growth, China demonstrates the capacity to simultaneously dominate global manufacturing while building out cutting-edge AI infrastructure.

Yet this triumphalism coexists with recognition of profound vulnerabilities. Goldman Sachs notes that “large parts of China’s domestic economy remain weak,” with the property sector producing “a 1.5 percentage point drag on GDP growth” (Goldman Sachs, December 19, 2025). This internal contradiction recalls Karl Polanyi’s (1944/2001) analysis of the “double movement”—the tendency of market expansion to generate its own social resistance and instability. China’s export-led growth strategy, however successful externally, leaves its domestic economy structurally imbalanced, dependent on external demand in ways that create systemic vulnerability.

The geopolitical implications cascade through multiple domains covered in these newsletters. The Economist’s report on Japan’s increasingly fraught relationship with China over Taiwan, the British Museum’s “cultural diplomacy” through lending artifacts to India, even Monocle’s celebration of Japanese craft traditions—all these represent what Joseph Nye (1990) termed “soft power,” the capacity to shape preferences and perceptions rather than coerce through military or economic force. Yet as The Economist observes, “China has held back from encouraging consumer boycotts—for now,” suggesting the fragility of these cultural exchanges in an era of intensifying great power competition (The Economist, December 22, 2025).

Subscribe

The newsletters’ scattered references to climate and migration issues reveal what Rob Nixon (2011) called “slow violence”—catastrophic processes that unfold gradually, resistant to dramatic narrative framing. The Economist notes that “the world’s first climate refugees will arrive in Australia in 2026” from Tuvalu (The Economist, December 20, 2025), marking a bureaucratic milestone that obscures the immense suffering and displacement already underway. Similarly, Monocle’s meditation on European housing inefficiency and heating costs—noting that “Britain’s energy prices are among the highest in Europe” while having “some of the continent’s least energy-efficient homes” (Newsletters December 26, 2025)—frames climate adaptation as primarily a technical and policy problem rather than a fundamental crisis of social organization.

This rhetorical strategy exemplifies what Naomi Klein (2014) analyzed as climate discourse’s tendency toward “magical thinking”—the fantasy that market mechanisms and incremental reforms can address systemic transformations. The UBS newsletter’s discussion of geothermal energy “going from niche to necessary” (The Economist, December 20, 2025) participates in this fantasy, suggesting technological innovation will solve problems that are fundamentally political and distributional.

The New Zealand emigration crisis, covered by The Economist, provides a microcosm of these dynamics. “Record numbers of New Zealanders are hopping ‘across the ditch’ to live and work in Australia” despite New Zealand ranking 17th globally in human development (The Economist, December 21, 2025). This internal migration within the Anglophone Pacific, like the anticipated Tuvaluan climate refugees, reveals what Ulrich Beck (1992) called the “risk society”—where individuals increasingly bear responsibility for navigating systemic vulnerabilities through personal mobility and optimization strategies.

ARTnews’s coverage of the British Museum’s lending program exemplifies the contradictions of institutional decolonization under neoliberalism. The Museum frames its transfer of “80 significant Greek and Egyptian objects” to Mumbai’s museum as “decolonization through collaboration rather than restitution” (ARTnews, December 18, 2025). Director Nicholas Cullinan explicitly rejects return of looted artifacts, instead promoting “long-term loans as a constructive alternative to disputes over ownership” and describing museums as practicing “cultural diplomacy” (ARTnews, December 18, 2025).

This represents what Sara Ahmed (2012) analyzed as “non-performativity”—institutional speech acts that name problems while actively preventing their resolution. By reframing restitution as “cultural diplomacy,” the British Museum transforms a question of justice into one of international relations, preserving its collection while appearing progressive. The Brighton and Hove Museums’ call to “decolonize Santa,” criticized for questioning “who gave Santa authority to evaluate children across all societies” (ARTnews, December 22, 2025), extends this logic to absurdity, suggesting how decolonial discourse can be instrumentalized for purposes far removed from material redress.

James Clifford’s (1997) concept of museums as “contact zones” helps clarify what’s at stake. Museums are not neutral repositories but active sites where asymmetric power relations are negotiated, reinforced, or occasionally challenged. The British Museum’s lending program maintains the fundamental power asymmetry—British curators still determine what goes where, for how long, under what conditions—while deploying the rhetoric of partnership and mutual benefit. This parallels what David Harvey (2005) called “accumulation by dispossession,” where neo-colonial relations are reproduced through seemingly progressive institutional arrangements.

These newsletters, taken together, reveal a late capitalist culture obsessed with measurement yet increasingly uncertain about what its metrics actually mean. Goldman Sachs can project GDP growth to two decimal places while acknowledging fundamental uncertainty about consumer behavior, labor markets, and geopolitical stability. ARTnews can track Joan Mitchell’s auction prices with precision while struggling to explain persistent gender disparities. The Economist can rank countries by “liveability” while New Zealanders vote with their feet, seeking something that indices cannot capture.

This suggests that despite—or perhaps because of—our sophisticated quantitative apparatus, we increasingly confront what Michael Polanyi (1966) called “tacit knowledge,” understanding that resists codification and measurement. The friction that Yvonne Xu celebrates in her monumental Stendig calendar, the “unique intensity” that distinguishes Joan Mitchell’s work, the “soft power” that shapes geopolitical outcomes—these qualitative dimensions persist despite their resistance to our metrics.

As we navigate what Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) called the “age of humans”—where human activity has become a geological force—perhaps our obsession with measurement represents not confidence but anxiety, an attempt to make legible processes that exceed our conceptual frameworks. The newsletters’ year-end timing is apt: December’s ritual of retrospection and forecasting dramatizes modernity’s temporal structure, always looking backward to quantify what happened and forward to predict what’s coming, never quite inhabiting the present that Xu’s calendar demands we see.

The question, then, is not whether our measurements are accurate—they often are, within their domains—but whether we’re measuring what matters. In an era of climate emergency, democratic backsliding, and intensifying inequality, the newsletters’ relentless focus on market valuations, export statistics, and liveability indices may represent a form of what Fredric Jameson (1991) called “the political unconscious”—an inability to imagine radical alternatives, even as our current arrangements visibly fail to sustain either human flourishing or planetary stability.

Share

Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.

Appadurai, A. (1986). Introduction: Commodities and the politics of value. In A. Appadurai (Ed.), The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective (pp. 3-63). Cambridge University Press.

Arrighi, G. (2007). Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the twenty-first century. Verso.

Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity (M. Ritter, Trans.). Sage. (Original work published 1986)

Benjamin, W. (1968). Theses on the philosophy of history. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations: Essays and reflections (pp. 253-264). Schocken Books.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1979)

Brooks, D. (2000). Bobos in paradise: The new upper class and how they got there. Simon & Schuster.

Chakrabarty, D. (2009). The climate of history: Four theses. Critical Inquiry, 35(2), 197-222.

Clifford, J. (1997). Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Harvard University Press.

Fraser, N. (2013). Fortunes of feminism: From state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis. New Left Review, II(80), 151-156.

Goldman Sachs. (2025, December 19). Briefings Newsletter. Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.

Harvey, D. (1990). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Blackwell.

Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.

Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Duke University Press.

Klein, N. (2014). This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the climate. Simon & Schuster.

Newsletters December 26, 2025. (2025). [Document compilation including Monocle, ARTnews, UBS Insights, The Economist, and Goldman Sachs newsletters].

Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.

Nye, J. S. (1990). Soft power. Foreign Policy, (80), 153-171.

Polanyi, K. (2001). The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1944)

Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. University of Chicago Press.

The Economist. (2025, December 17-24). The Economist Today [Newsletter series].

Veblen, T. (2007). The theory of the leisure class. Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1899)

[Written, Researched, and Edited by Pablo Markin. Some parts of the text have been produced with the aid of Claude, Anthropic, tools (December 26, 2025). The featured image has been generated in Canva (December 26, 2025).]

[Support the Open Access Blogs: https://openaccessblogs.gumroad.com/l/openaccessblogssupport.]

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Pablo Markin (December 26, 2025). The Metrics of Modernity: Reflections on Value, Time, and Power in the Late Anthropocene. Open Culture.