Economy

Two senses, and the distance between them is the argument. In the first, economy is simply resource allocation, which is a neutral description covering any arrangement for getting things to people, including a gift economy, a trade economy and a household. In the second, the economy with the definite article is something else entirely, an anima bank or a god for wealth endo-idealism, which is to say an object of worship holding stored energy that must be propitiated. The grammatical shift marks the theological one. Once an allocation mechanism becomes the economy it acquires the properties of a deity: it can be healthy or wounded, it demands sacrifice and harm done in its name is excused in advance. Billionaires are its anima bank in the same way saints and relics were, which is why they are defended with the vehemence usually reserved for religious figures. The trade economy is the form Marsh examines most closely, and her verdict is that it is built to facilitate power rather than financial efficiency, constructed to feed the insatiable demands of power rather than serving financial reason or even happiness. Her alternative is the approval economy, in which goods are provided as a service rather than service being bought and sold as a good, and which counts service to oneself, to others and to society at large.

Economics defines its subject as the allocation of scarce resources, which matches Marsh's first sense exactly, and substantivist economic anthropology after Karl Polanyi argued that market allocation is one historical form among many rather than the natural case. Her second sense has its own tradition. Marx's commodity fetishism, Weber on the Protestant ethic and Walter Benjamin's fragment on capitalism as religion all treat the economy as having acquired religious properties, and the observation that markets are described in terms of health, confidence and appeasement is a commonplace of economic sociology. Marsh's addition is the mechanism, since in her account the economy is not merely like a god but performing the identical function, storing anima and requiring sacrifice, which makes the resemblance structural rather than metaphorical.