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
Was the evolution of capitalist society triggered by individuals and firms each producing, exchanging and using the metaphoric equivalent of each others bodily waste or poo - products, services and money? Something that is more or less useless to the producer and useful to someone else.
Is the business of business the business?
Grounded in Aristotle’s concept of value in use, vulgar economics can also be described as a proto-classical theory of value.
Earthy, visceral and deeply organic, vulgar economics is close to a poop theory of value. Seeking to explain how societies are supplied with value in use or usefulness, based on the counter-intutive production of the opposite - things the producer can’t use - useless waste that must be voided.
As old as the market, a key tenet of vulgar economics is the existence of an immutable law of supply. A secret organising principle that compels the dispatch of “disposable” products, services and even money to the market in the same way that a bear is compelled by nature to dispatch 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 to perfom socially useful work.
Are markets entropic engines powered by waste?
Humanity’s most embarrassing organ and most reviled, worthless and terminal product, the more apt metaphors for the unseen market forces that govern economies and the supply of useful things.
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 that someone else has done the same, but in reverse. The market bringing the least valued (the unwant or refuse) and the most valued (the want or desire) into the intimate relationship of exchange.
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.
Though unknown to the sanitised, and thus impoverished, neoclassical theory of exchange value, this dirty theorem has the power to explain how value in use is generated and distributed. The never ending need to separate ourselves from our useless shit promoting social purpose through the dissipation of energy in its social form - value in use - without social responsibility or obligation. Society benefiting from the collective imperative to metaphorically poo, more so than the psychology of individual greed.
This is economics returned to the dirt and to its elemental and practical purpose - to realistically explain how societies are continually supplied with all the resources required to live well.
Not that you will see this entropic mechanism for the socally efficient 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. A decade or more of policy implications waiting to be discovered. Findings that can connect global crisis with the universalised practice of taking the exchange of unwants to it’s modern day extreme .
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.
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 among the first to formulate a decision model based on the concept of value in use.
The project is possible because of Tunjic Legal and Commercial Pty Ltd.