Grounded in the physics of life and the idea of usefulness, vulgar economics explains why things are turning to shit.
“When two parties each produce something they don’t want but the other does they will seek to exchange their waste product.
One might be offering cash and the other a commodity but they’ve each produced a kind of useful excrement .”
Peter Tunjic | Vulgar Economist
Vulgar economics is the study of how producing and exchanging unwanted Things (unwants or the equivalent of bodily waste)generates value in use or it’s highly destructive opposite, counter-value.
The Purpose of Vulgar economics is to understand and solve the problem of usefulness : How individuals, corporations, and governments harness their capitals to generate energy in its social form - Value.
The Art of the Deuce or Why We Sell What We Sell
Say’s unspoken second law states that the act of producing a good or service that cannot be used by the producer (an “unwant” the economic equvalent of bodily waste) creates an overwhelming urge to supply and sell that unwanted thing.
Why Markets Abhor a Gradient
The vulgar market is the real and visceral market. An ignoble co-ordination device in which producers exchange their unwanted goods, services and income based on the utility of an unmistakable gamble of non bodily excreta.
The double co-incidence of unwants producing disequilibrium and a gradient along which the unusable will tend to flow to where it is useable and will be used. Allocating resouces to where they are more useful.
Why We Win Some But Risk Losing It all
Why does maximising profits for a firm’s shareholders while operating within the bounds of open and free competition, without deception not also increase social welfare when measured in terms of the availability and accessibility of socially useful things
How can useful things be in decline in the world if the market is so good, just, powerful and efficient?
Vulgar Economic Insights
Rooted in Aristotle’s concept that all value is value in use, vulgar economics is intellectually a proto classical theory of value.
Value in use is another way to say energy in its social form. The essential resource required for individuals, corporations and states to exist, grow and flourish.
But there’s no way to sanitise it.
Earthy, visceral and deeply organic, proto classical economics is an unmistakeable “scatological” or even “poop theory of value”.
It is a vulgar theory because it proposes that the evolution of capitalist society was triggered by individuals and firms each producing and exchanging the equivalent of their bodily waste or poop - products, services and money. Hacking one of the most powerful “forces” in the universe - entropy understood in terms of the unavailability of energy.
There exists an immutable law of motion as old as the market. A secret organising principle that compels the despatch of “disposable” products, services and even money to the market in the same way that a bear is compelled by nature to despatch it’s shit to the woods. A primordial force that triggers the mutual flow of things from where they are unusable to where they are useful and more likely to be used.
Humanity’s most embarrassing organ, the more apt metaphor for the unseen market forces that govern economies.
Overwhelmed by the urge to purge what they have created but cannot use, producers of commodities and incomes have little choice but to export the unwanted product of their industry in the hope of substituting it for something they can use.
Countless “invisible ani” guided by the “call of nature” drawing individuals and corporations into market relations, which in turn, means that the things that each has no use for, but the other does, flows to where it can be put to use. Remarkeably provisioning society by increasing the value in use available and accessible to power sustainable growth. The call of nature promoting social purpose through the dissipation of energy in its social form - value in use - without social responsibility or obligation.
This is economics stripped back to its elemental and practical purpose - to explain how societies are continually supplied with all the resources required to live well.
Not that you will see this socially efficient mechanism for the distribution of usefulness described in any economic textbook. Attracted to the sterile, linear and methodologically infallible idea that all value is value in exchange, the virtuous similarity between kaka, cash and commodities has long gone unnoticed and unexamined.
By focusing on demand and wants, economists have missed the fundamental and practical truth that all exchange is based on the double co-incidence of the supply of unwanted things or unwants. We must all produce things we don’t want or can’t keep, in order for exchange to occur and for capitalism to continue to function. Fated, in the extreme and by excess, to never be satiated by what we produce ourselves and to only be satisfied by consuming the unwanted product of another.
Proving that perhaps, the best place to hide an attractive lie is in an economic equation and, the best place to hide the unattractive truth, is in the last place anyone would choose to look.
About the Vulgar Economist
The Vulgar Economist is a long term project to explain the economic phenomenon of usefulness, define the domain of problems associated with it, solve or at least propose solutions to one or more of those problems and be the first to formulate a decision model based on the concept of value in use. The aim is to avoid the fate of so many pioneering theorists - being dismissed as a crank.