Literally, in a quantitative sense. How much do we care about something? Is it possible to measure such a thing? Are there proximal corollaries that are meaningful?
If we are broad and generous, a definition of economy might be something like “the whole of human activity.” Currently we reduce the “Economy” to a few numbers, such as gross domestic product. While this certainly captures a lot of valuable activity, it very much leaves out large swathes of the collective human experience that we find meaningful. Money is a token that has emerged as the fundamental unit of exchange in our current economic system, and by proxy, the closest thing to a “Unit of Caring”.
It can be challenging to measure certain things we care about, namely the interiority of our experiences, even though it’s the most valuable of feedback for each individual. But, we can count very easily how much we spend. We seem to care an awfully lot about our prison population, in most states we spend twice on incarceration than we do on schooling per person.
Right now, money comes into existence through fiat currency when the central bank (Federal Reserve in the USA) loans money to the government. We can create fiat anyway we want. What if instead, money came into existence by funding the things we care about? What if we subsidized and paid for people to go to school to be teachers, social workers and therapists. All the professions that in great shortage, and can only be done by a person (not a robot, like clerks, factories, and farms)? So, it may be difficult to determine improved life quality in any rigorous quantitative way, we certainly CAN account for how much we’re spending on the aspects of life that are more likely to lead to improved quality.