This passage personally resonates with me. In my working years as owner of a company, I knew day to day the discipline of assigning a value, in terms of what someone else would be willing to pay. Exchange value: dollars for service, the quid pro quo. Is this a fair assessment of what we’ve become as Americans? I mean a reflex, an instinct of the American soul – is to estimate how much a “customer” will exchange for everything.

The quoted passage calls forth three dilemmas that persist to haunt me. 1) We are lost in a bewildering flood of commercialism, without a clue about who we are as a people. 2) What happens when we monetize everything, things that are so important as to be beyond price? I mean scholarship, art, statecraft, etc. 3) Without mindful attention to my own value, within my destiny, am I too financialized, worth no more than my production potential?  And you?

…the culture of a society
of which commerce is the soul,

just as personal rivalry
was the soul of culture
among the ancient Greeks,

and war, conquest, and law
among the ancient Romans.

The tradesman
is able to value everything
without producing it, and to value it
according to the requirements of the consumer
rather than his own personal needs.

“How many and what class
of people will consume this?” is his question of questions.

Hence, he instinctively and incessantly employs
this mode of valuation
and applies it to everything,
including the productions of art
and science,
and of thinkers,
scholars,
artists,
statesmen,
nations,
political parties,
and even entire ages:
with respect to everything
produced or created
he inquires into the supply and demand
in order to estimate for himself the value of a thing.

This, when once it has been made
the principle of an entire culture,
worked out to its most minute and subtle details,
and imposed upon every kind of will and knowledge,

this is what you men of the coming
century will be proud of,

—if the prophets
of the commercial classes are right
in putting that century into your possession!

The Dawn Of Day by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 175

P.S. Have we not become a society of gamblers?  Everyone is his/her own oddsmaker, each shaping him/herself into a brand others are likely to find desirable?