I’ve recently published a book titled Selfish Cooperation, available as a free download through Zenodo.
The book introduces Productive Value–Productive Power (PV-PP), a theoretical framework I’ve been developing over approximately five years to examine how productive systems interact, exchange value, develop capabilities, and evolve over time.
The central distinction is between two concepts:
Productive Value (PV): The value realized or transferred through interactions among individuals, organizations, and other productive systems.
Productive Power (PP): The underlying capacity to generate, preserve, transform, and sustain productive value over time.
An economic interaction may benefit both participants immediately while affecting their future productive capabilities very differently. Conversely, an interaction that provides little immediate economic benefit may substantially strengthen future productive capacity.
Selfish Cooperation explores these relationships across economics, cooperation, competition, human behavior, institutions, social organization, and the evolution of productive systems.
The broader objective is to investigate whether a common mathematical framework can help describe phenomena traditionally examined through different disciplines.
This is an independently developed theoretical work, not a claim that PV-PP replaces established economic models. Its explanatory value, limitations, and potential empirical applications remain open to evaluation.
The book is freely available to read or download:
Selfish Cooperation — Productive Value–Productive Power Framework
https://zenodo.org/records/23828040
For readers interested in the framework’s technical development, additional material is available here:
https://amundsenlance.github.io/pvpp-framework/
I’d welcome perspectives from economists and other researchers on the underlying question:
Does distinguishing realized value from the capacity to generate future value provide a useful additional dimension for understanding economic behavior, cooperation, and long-term development?
I’m particularly interested in identifying where this perspective overlaps existing economic theories, where it may offer additional explanatory value, and where its assumptions or representations need improvement.
Lance Amundsen
Independent Researcher
