For most of human history money moved at the speed of rumor. Coins clinked, notes passed from palm to palm, ledgers were updated by candlelight, and the national accounts arrived months late, already yellowed at the edges. When economists boasted of “fine-tuning” the economy they were, in truth, steering by last year’s starlight. A tax cut might be celebrated or condemned long before anyone could say, with numbers rather than anecdotes, whether it had coaxed a single extra lathe into motion. This fog was not a failure of intellect but a limitation of atoms: you cannot weigh what you cannot see.
Digitization lifts that fog. Every time a salary lands in a checking account, a barcode beeps at a supermarket checkout, or a freight truck passes beneath a highway sensor, the event is translated into a pulse of light and stored as a coordinate in an ever-growing lattice of data. Money, once a slippery metal disk, has become a measurable current, its velocity and voltage visible millisecond by millisecond. Productivity, once inferred from quarterly surveys and hopeful assumptions about factory utilization, is now read directly from the keystrokes of design software, the revolutions of CNC spindles, and the silent hand-offs between warehouse robots. The economy has begun to narrate itself in real time.
The consequence is more than convenience; it is a shift in the epistemic basis of policy. When the Treasury tweaks a withholding rule, it can watch the change ripple through payroll processors that same afternoon, see hourly wage deposits rise or fall within days, and observe how quickly the adjustment shows up in grocery sales or ride-hail trips. When a central bank experiments with negative interest rates, it no longer has to wait for the next business-confidence survey; it can trace the immediate rerouting of cash from corporate deposit accounts to money-market funds, measure the lag between cheaper credit and new purchase orders, and even detect the moment hesitation gives way to optimism in the form of expanded server capacity at online retailers. Policy becomes a controlled variable rather than a hopeful sermon.
This new visibility reframes old debates. The argument over whether government spending “crowds out” private investment used to hinge on stylized models and ideological conviction; now satellite imagery of night-time lights, card-transaction metadata, and anonymized payroll flows can show whether new public-works projects coincide with rising or falling activity at nearby small businesses. Questions that once filled academic journals—Does raising the minimum wage reduce employment? How quickly do tax incentives translate into research hours?—are being answered with granular timelines that reveal the exact week, sometimes the exact day, when behavior shifts.
Yet the transformation is still young. Much of the world’s economic life remains offline, recorded only in the memory of a street vendor or the oral agreement between farmers. Even where data are abundant, they arrive riddled with gaps, biases, and privacy armor. The economist’s new telescope is powerful, but its lens is partly fogged and pointed through a moving train window. Still, for the first time since the discipline began, economists can watch the bloodstream of value creation and exchange while the patient is running, not merely during the annual autopsy. Policy is becoming a clinical intervention tested against live vital signs rather than a prayer uttered over last year’s corpse. That alone is a revolution no less dramatic than the moment when astronomy replaced astrology—when measurement replaced incantation, and we began to navigate by what is instead of what we wished.