An economic good J is commonly particularized in terms of how long it takes to give up its useful life as it is expended in producing the next generation of goods. Such distinctions are, for example, apparent when a commodity is characterized as durable versus non-durable. The parameter V_J measures this notion of durability in its inverse, rather as an accountant computes a turnover fraction: a good J has the intrinsic property of lasting 1/V_J years before its economic life is exhausted. This property is presumed operative for any economic sector employing J as a factor of production.

Implicit in this minimal business logistic is a presumption that economic goods, once produced, immediately enter into a sort of ‘gravitational field’ that pulls the economic potential out of them at rates characteristic of a commodity’s logistical identity, irrespective of the productive process in which a good might be employed, or whether it is employed at all. The topography in which the waterway/waterwheel of our earlier analogy is set would, for example, dictate the ultimate rates of fluid flow through all the industries served by the waterway.

This view is further reinforced by our sectoral analysis context, which would have it that, once acquired, an asset must give up its useful life in producing the purchasing sector’s output. Firms can sell-off assets; but these are generally purchased by other firms in the same sector. Since a sector can only profit from the sale of its own product, sunk costs can only be recovered by exhausting overstocked inputs through production of the output created by the sector that purchased the input.

We should also note that fabricated goods are designed around the idea of planned obsolescence. It would be not be economical for any portion of a toaster-oven to outlast its weakest component; therefore no component is designed to be more durable than the one that is intrinsically likely to fail first. Thus all toaster-ovens are, by design, likely to have rather uniform service lives.

Goods that are not designed, such as produce or minerals, will nonetheless have a service life forced upon them by the logistical channels into which they feed. Elemental commodities are not useful until they are refined in processes bringing together diverse fabricated assets having their own intrinsic life cycles. And rates of material flow through these processes confer a quantifiable logistical identity on the raw materials that enter.

Finally we note that sectors’ interest in minimizing their asset levels operates to keep turnover rates V_J pegged at the maximal, hence constant, value consistent with asset J’s physical make-up. This motive is of course the same irrespective of a sector’s product. And the varying uses that a given commodity might have among various sectors are most likely to find expression in terms of the quantity of an asset that is kept on hand, rather than in any modification of its natural rate of turnover.

Further discussions particularize the variability V_J of a generic good J, of a household sector’s V_L, and of the velocity of value V₀.