Core Terms
How four terms from the First Edition carry into the Second Edition.
The First Edition introduced these terms in the wording quoted below. The Second Edition states its working meanings as proposed terms and distinctions, not calibrated measures, and its chapters supply the examples, qualifications and historical revisions. For current meanings, use the Second Edition.
Relational Mass
First Edition wording: “The quantifiable weight of a relational interaction — a function of repetition and time investment. The foundation of all cost calculations in the framework.”
Second Edition: kept, with a narrower role. Chapter 5 uses relational mass to direct attention to durable significance in carried history, alongside the ledger and exchange patterns.
Chapter 5: History and relational mass →
The True Economy
First Edition wording: “The full accounting of what a relationship costs — not what it felt like it cost. The difference between perceived and actual expenditure is one of the framework’s primary diagnostic instruments.”
Second Edition: revised. The Real or True Economy names reciprocal investment in a continuing relationship, one of four economies. The First Edition’s True Economy Audit is renamed the Relational Capability Audit, a proposed instrument whose validation the edition does not establish.
Chapter 6: Four economies, several kinds of asymmetry →
Chapter 14: The Relational Capability Audit →
Cost Terrain
First Edition wording: “The landscape of relational expenditure mapped across a relationship’s full history. Reveals where investment concentrated, where it thinned, and where collapse became structurally inevitable.”
Second Edition: not used as a named term. Expenditure is recorded with the bearer of each cost identified, and kept separate from benefit to the recipient.
Chapter 4: Trinkets, expenditure, signal, and register →
Scale Invariance
First Edition wording: “The same mechanics that govern a marriage govern a team, an institution, and a civilization. The framework applies across substrates and scales — this is its central testable claim.”
Second Edition: not used as a named term. The subtitle still speaks of connection across substrates and scales; the edition lists what would change the framework in its final chapter.
Chapter 21: What would change this framework →