Can economics and corporate law be made useful?

Essays on the production and supply of value in use by Australian corporate lawyer, 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 describes the ability of a thing to do something good. If a thing can produce a good change, it’s useful.

But useful things are in decline - spare time, savings, languages, bees and butterflies, income equality, 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 have proven useful and are rapidly disappearing.

Why have societies stopped supplying the most useful things?

The obvious answer is that the economic style of thinking permeating all parts of society was not designed with usefulness in mind. Dig into the theory of value behind the faith in markets and prices and you won’t find anything that explains how useful things are supplied. As the Great Collapse shows, producing things to the advantage of society was always a matter of failing hope in mathematical models rather than in reason and science.

If economics is not the study of usefulness and it matters, we need to look elsewhere for solutions to crises.

To repopulate the world with things that do good, 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 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.