A 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 excrement.  A type of calculated bet premised on the idea of everyone producing things that they can’t use and don’t want for the purpose of wagering that another producer has produced something they can’t use and don’t want.

But this is not a game of chance or a lottery. 

The miracle of the vulgar market is that properly understood, useless things want to flow to where they are most useful and will be used.  Whereas in the mythical market, governed by profits and preference have worked in reverse, the rules of the vulgar market tend to work in favour of producers, society and nature.

Thankfully, it does not require an economist’s myth to explain how the vulgar market works or Friedman Esque moralising guidance.  Nor does it require an Erdos number to understand. And though there is a science to the vulgar market, you do not need an advanced degree in algebra, calculus or statistical methods to analyse, interpret and predict market behaviour and outcomes.

If orthodox economics wraps the market in impenetrable mathematics, the secrets of the vulgar market have been wrapped in sh$t for millennia. The last place any serious scholar would look.

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In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that the “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange” was inherent in human nature. But in the following passage, Jean Baptiste Say offers a more viceral explanation for trade. The urge to sell being less about human nature and perhaps more about the call of nature.

“When the producer has put the finishing hand to his product, he is most anxious to sell it immediately, lest its value should diminish in his hands. Nor is he less anxious to dispose of the money he may get for it; for the value of money is also perishable. But the only way of getting rid of money is in the purchase of some product or other. ”

— Jean Baptiste Say, 1803

though Say, is best known for “Say’s law” or the “law of the market” a classical principle that states the act of production of goods creates its own demand, it seems Say may have also have “discovered” a second or number two law of economics.

Say’s second law states that the act of producing a good or service that cannot be used by the producer (an “unwant”) creates an overwhelming urge to supply and sell that unwanted thing.  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.

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“But surely you’re mistaken” smiled Hermes. 

With promethean hubris, the mischievous god announced that he, being smarter than their father, could do much better.

“I wager, I could squeeze out even more efficiency” he winked. “I’m the god of finance you know. Trust me. I know exactly what I’m doing.”

With that, and loving a good poo joke, he transformed the herd so that from then on the horses would eat the grass to produce the dung but the dung beetle would pay the horse with their delicious frass. The horse no longer getting their energy from the grass but by exchanging their dung for frass!

Hermes had cursed the horse to value frass as highly as the beetle valued dung.

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