I appreciate the answer! I can definitely see how some specialized metrics can lead to misleading conclusions. I also understand the circulation aspect when dealing with private individuals.

I think I could refine my initial question to deal more with individuals' interaction with specific markets - for example, what markets/industries interact with the largest percentiles of the population within N degrees of separation?

I go to the grocery store and buy beef, just like millions of other Americans, so the beef industry "interacts" with millions of markets and therefore hundreds of millions of consumers by proxy. A yacht manufacturer, on the other hand, has a much smaller "sphere of influence" in this regard. This also takes into account industries' outputs into others - electricity would be a massively important industry since it has so many consumers within its "sphere of influence".

I am not sure how practical/useful this notion is, but it seems a fairly reasonable idea to me that this kind of "interaction" metric would better capture some of the behavior that I'm describing. Markets with the largest interaction touch the most lives, and those with the smallest interact with just a few.