Hyphae

Make-or-buy analysis is a standard tool in corporate procurement. The question — should we produce this internally or purchase it externally? — looks simple but requires understanding the actual physical and economic relationships between inputs, processes, and outputs. For large corporations this is a well-funded specialty. For cooperatives and democratic organizations trying to make the same decisions, the tools don’t exist.

The first challenge is data: reliable input-output tables for most industries are either proprietary, out of date, or aggregated at a level of abstraction that makes them useless for organizational decisions. The second challenge is modeling: market prices are useful but often misleading signals, especially for organizations operating outside the standard profit-maximizing assumptions. Building an honest model of economic relationships requires being explicit about what you’re assuming and why.

Hyphae starts from marginalist assumptions — price as a sufficient summary of value — and builds toward more sophisticated physical economic models that can support genuine democratic planning conversations. The goal is to make the economic relationships that are currently opaque to most organizations legible enough to reason about.