History
Fundamentally, price systems have been around as long as there has been trade or money.
The institutional economist Thorstein Veblen wrote a tract which was seminal in development of the term as discussed in this article: The Engineers and the Price System. Its chapter VI, A Memorandum on a Practicable Soviet of Technicians discusses the possibility of socialist revolution in the United States comparable to that then occurring in Russia (the Soviets had not yet at that time become a state (USSR formed in 1922)).
From its beginnings, the price system has evolved into the system of global capitalism that is present in the early 21st century. The Soviet Union and other communist nations with a centralized planned economy were controlled price systems. Whether the ruble or the dollar is used in the economic system, the criterion of a price system is the use of money as an arbiter and usual final arbiter of whether a thing is done or not. In other words, few things are done without consideration for the costs and the potential making of a profit in a price system.
Read more about this topic: Price System
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)