On the Production and Supply of

Useful Things

OCCASIONAL ESSAYS AND OBSERVATIONS

by Peter Tunjic

“I’m neither an economist nor a scientist. I’m a lawyer who works with corporations. But, without modern value theory, backed by science, there is no future for company law.”

Why learn about usefulness

Useful things are in decline - peace, spare time, savings, languages, bees and butterflies, thriveable incomes, native forests, fertility and birth rates, attention spans, topsoil, housing, social license, fish and other wildlife in number and species, research and development, liveability, food, fresh water, bowling clubs, liberal arts degrees, and even listed companies. All useful and in decline.

Why aren’t the most useful things produced?

The obvious answer is economics. Dig into the theory of value behind the faith in markets, demand and supply and prices and you won’t find anything that explains how the most useful things are supplied and distributed. For economics, the production of things with the greatest use was always a matter of failing hope in mathematical models rather than in reason and science.

If economics is not the study of usefulness we need to look elsewhere for solutions to the mortal crisis of usefulness.

To repopulate the world with things that do the often invisibe work of creating the “good life”, learning everything there is to know about the concept of use and its opposite is a natural place to start - what makes something useful, what is the measure of usefulness, how it’s generated and supplied, who or what produces it, what destroys it, and why the true measure of value in a warming world is not price but value in use. Questions that once occupied great minds whose answers have all but been forgotten or ignored.

The search for a modern theory of value that can solve these questions is the Millenian Challange.