Vulgar Economics

A SYSTEMATIC ENQUIRY INTO THE PRODUCTION OF USEFUL THINGS OR VALUE IN USE

In 2021 I started the Millennia Challenge. A competition with one competitor and only one goal - to theorise the production and supply of things that might be considered useful to civilization.

 Though neither a mainstream nor a heterodox economist, I have through my thinking and writing over thirty years transformed myself into a self described vulgar economist.

Those familiar with economic history, will remember that Marx coined the term vulgar economics to describe “unscientific” economic theories that focus on the superficial, outward appearances of capitalism like supply and demand and are most useful and therefore defended, by the wealthy who have become the primary beneficiaries of vulgar economics.

But, vulgar also means making explicit and offensive reference to bodily functions.

Perhaps obscured for millennia by humanities disgust for excrement, the uncanny similarity between poo and the things we buy and the money we buy it with has somehow been missed.  Dung is no less sweet to a dung beetle than the finest perfume is wrapped in a bow.    But to the horse and the cosmetics company both are principally an output or waste product.  Only available to the beetle in the field and the consumer in the market because it is useless to and unwanted by the horse and the company that produced it.  

Vulgar economics is based on the idea that economics is better understood as the study of unwanted skat rather than scarcity. Unwanted things being the central organising principle of capitalism and governed by Say’s second or number two law.

 An immutable law of motion as old as the market, that compels a producer to no less dispatch products, services and even money that are useless to the producer to the market, than a bear is compelled by nature to dispatch its sh$t to the woods. And, most likely governed by the same law of supply. The echo of entropy heard as much in the woods as in the market.