Conventional economics doesn't capture all of the economy's costs and, according to its critics, it isn't meant to. The Harvard economist Steven Marglin argued in his 2008 book The Dismal Science that mainstream economics has always been the servant of powerful interests, which naturally want reassurance that what they are doing is for the best, and don't wish to hear otherwise. Mainstream economics, he writes, 'has been shaped by an agenda focused on showing that markets are good for people rather than on discovering how markets actually work.' So economists still maintain that money (as defined by the banking and finance community) is the best measure of the human value of economic activities--even though we see more and more examples every day of environments and lives ruined by the pursuit of monetary profit.