Power economy

The definition turns on the difference between a transaction and a connection. A transaction is an energy exchange that does not establish empathic or euphoric conduits and results in power for the stronger agent, whereas a connection is a balanced interaction that builds a conduit. A power economy is what you get when every interaction is the first kind, so nothing accumulates between people and everything accumulates at the strong end. That is the endpoint of the second sense of power, since once a position is established it supplies the unequal force that turns every subsequent interaction into a transaction in which the powerful gain more. Marsh's verdict on the trade economy follows from the same reading. It is constructed to feed the insatiable demands of power rather than financial reason or even happiness and peace, and it is built to facilitate power rather than financial efficiency, which accounts for arrangements that make no sense as ways of producing or distributing anything. The framework's alternative is the approval economy, in which goods are provided as a service rather than service bought and sold as a good, and which counts service to oneself, to others and to society at large. The natural duty Marsh wrote against the power economy is simple and applies regardless of position. Each person is responsible for creating balanced connection in all interactions, whether the other party is a child or an ancestor, someone in possession of all they need or someone in great need.

Economic sociology has long argued that markets are embedded in social relations rather than separate from them, following Polanyi and Granovetter, and the substantivist tradition treats market allocation as one historical form among several. Simmel described money dissolving personal ties into calculable relations, which is close to Marsh's transaction. Political economy studies rent extraction and market power directly. Her contribution is to define an economy by what its interactions fail to build rather than by what they distribute, which makes the absence of connection the diagnostic rather than the inequality of the outcome.