Trade economy

The first clause is a claim about measurement rather than about distribution. A trade economy values only goods and services traded to the wealthy, so anything not sold to someone with money registers as worth nothing, which is why caregiving, subsistence and community work disappear from the accounts. The second clause names the effect on approval, since societal approval is dissociated from society and placed in the hands of the powerful, which is the first sense of currency operating at system scale. The third names the function, resource allocation across endosocial barriers, which locates where trade economies appear rather than condemning them, since exchange is how resources cross boundaries between people with no relationship. Marsh's verdict is that the arrangement is built to facilitate power rather than financial efficiency and is constructed to feed the insatiable demands of power instead of financial reason or even happiness and peace. Her example of the mechanism is arithmetic. Of several traders, two who have pooled resources and have no dependents are the most powerful, one with six dependents works far harder and must divide their assets by seven, and a disabled individual is worse placed again, so the economy rewards the absence of dependency rather than the presence of contribution. Underlying every patriarchal society is the idea that caregivers, children and dependents should be grateful, since trade economies see them as burdensome. Her alternative is the approval economy, where a reputation economy allows participation in trade and an approval economy allows a person to become part of a society.

Feminist economics has made the measurement argument at length, with Marilyn Waring showing that national accounting excludes unpaid work and Nancy Folbre analysing the care economy. Polanyi described the disembedding of markets from society, and Amartya Sen's capabilities approach holds that income measures the wrong thing. Degrowth and wellbeing economics propose alternative accounts. Marsh's contribution is to combine the measurement point with the approval one, since treating currency as displaced societal approval accounts for why the exclusion from accounting also produces exclusion from standing, which the economic critiques generally treat as separate problems.