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This article examines the defining features of the world's three major economic systems: Traditional, free market and command. Each system addresses the fundamental problem of how to allocate scarce resources in a different way. In all three cases, the decision revolves around what and how much to produce, for whom to produce and to whose benefit. Kinship, custom and religion enter into these decisions in a traditional economy. In a free-market economy, self interest alone matters; buyers and sellers bid freely and openly on goods and services, and the price of purchases directly affects supply and demand. Unlike both traditional and free market systems, orthodox command economies ban all forms of private ownership; the state employs everyone and resources are allocated by central planners.

We all worry about what economic conditions hold in store for us. The answers to our present-day concerns lies in figuring out where we stand in much longer business cycles lasting from five to seven years, fifteen to twenty-five, and forty-five to sixty years. The behavior of each of these cycles is influenced by underlying economic processes. Globalization, sustainable manufacturing, renewable energy, and the knowledge economy are all important trends. To truly appreciate their likely impact, though, we must also know something about Juglar, Kuznets and especially, Kondratieff Cycles.

Max Weber's career as a sociologist spanned just twenty-five or so years during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The sheer breadth and depth of his body of work, though, belies the brevity of his career. He wrote extensively on religion, capitalism, politics, and class but is best known for his “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” (1905). Above all, it was his theories about social actions, factual judgments and ideal-types, and the formal method of sociological inquiry he developed from them that are perhaps his most enduring contribution to the field of sociology.

Over a million American workers, both blue and white collar, lose their jobs each year in mass layoffs. Companies have traditionally resorted to layoffs during economic slowdowns; however, this is now also occurring in good economies for purely strategic reasons. By shedding faltering product lines, moving costly operations overseas, and outsourcing burdensome administrative functions, businesses hope to transform themselves into "lean " operations. The reality is often different.

Unemployment comes in several forms and affects millions of people at any given time. People can find themselves out of a job because the economy is in a downturn. Or they could be in the unenviable position of working in a dying industry. The luckier ones are simply transitioning from one job to another by choice. For most people, though, unemployment is a stressful personal experience. And though economists agree that steps should be taken to keep unemployment low for the well-being of the economy as a whole, they disagree on how best to do this.

Capitalism has been spectacularly successful over the last two hundred years in harnessing technology and labor. This continues to take place first and foremost inside the individual firm. Changes in the way it is owned and managed in response to ever increasing scale and scope of industrial production have in this respect been instrumental to that success. To date, the balance of power within the firm has see-sawed back and forth between the two, giving rise to four distinct types of corporate capitalism — family, managerial, institutional, and welfare — each with its own management philosophy and organizational structure.

Geographical economics takes a long-overdue look at the possible casual role location plays in the growth of productive capacity and wealth. More traditional economic theory has largely considered location irrelevant. Essentially, different regions enjoyed different natural endowments purely by accident, and regional economic growth was caused entirely by external market forces. But such dismissive explanations glossed over the ever-growing realities of spatial concentration and economic specialization, prompting some economists to ask if the two were casually related. Economic growth in effect may well be an endogenous process after all. The challenge lies in not contradicting or undermining the basic tenets of modern economic theory while making the argument. Success here was deemed worthy of the considerable effort required since it would reapply existing concepts to the role of place in economic activity left languishing for want of a broader theory.

The fundamental dynamics of supply and demand apply as much to labor as they do to markets for goods and services. Unemployment, the bane of white and blue collar workers alike, occurs whenever there are more people seeking a particular job than there are employers looking to fill such positions. Thus, unemployment is a constant that varies only in degree and kind. How employers determine the number of workers they require at any given time and the number of hours workers are willing to spend on the job at a given wage- rate are both micro-economically quantifiable. No less important (but harder to precisely pin down) is the microeconomic impact of unemployment. Consumer spending accounts for almost two thirds of all purchases in developed economies, and the vast majority of consumers here are wage earners. So, higher unemployment rates slow or cause negative economic growth that can lead to more lay-offs.

When firms hire workers they are, knowingly or unknowingly, acquiring human capital. The idea is far from new but only recently has it acquired enough stature to be considered a factor of production in its own right. Human Capital Theory and the Resource View of Firm maintain that to prosper, a business must create value in ways that rivals cannot. The wellspring of innovative thinking this requires is the knowledge worker capable of 'learning by doing.' Such at least is the current economic thinking that drives the more traditional human resource function of screening, selection, training and development.

With statistics, economists can study the intricacies of real world markets, forecast future business conditions and, most importantly of all, test the applicability of their models to the real world. Before statistics was introduced, economics was a strictly theoretical exercise. People accepted its principles because they made sense or "seemed" right. But the all important objective corroboration of theory with fact was missing. That bothered economists keen on making their discipline more scientific. They went on to found the field of econometrics that has since become a mainstay of economic analysis.

Monetary theory explores the root economic causes shaping the demand for currency. The amount of money in circulation at any given moment, some contend, is largely determined by total spending across the economy. Because the speed at which this money changes hands rarely changes and there's a lead-time involved in more goods and services, increasing the money supply only causes inflation. Another major school of thought emphasizes individual preference in the use of money as the major determinant. Consequently, the money supply, output, prices and the rate at which money is spent can all fluctuate over time. Third theory views money as really just another commodity and demand for it is subject to supply, prices, inflation and preference for substitutes.

Managerial economics pays attention to the firm in ways that other branches of economics never has. No longer seen as the 'black-box' buffeted by market forces alone, the firm and how it allocates resources and makes decisions has since become the focal point of quantitative analysis that real-world companies have welcomed. An amalgam of micro-economics, operations research and management science, the subject's emphasis on the practicalities of running a business day-to-day using applied mathematics has proven a welcome change of tack for many line managers.

International economic development must somehow find a way to bring world trade's zero-sum game to a close. The idea that someone gains only at someone else's expense makes the prospect of globalization far less appealing. Yet for better and for worse, that's exactly what happened from the sixteenth century onwards. We live today in one of two worlds — the developed and the developing — as a consequence. Such is the nature of seemingly intractable dilemmas economists specializing in development grapple with. Daily they ask themselves: How exactly can we ensure a more equitable sharing of wealth between countries and continents through the workings of competitive markets? Should developing countries invest in domestic or export industries? Is capital investment proper or the technological innovation it affords the true engine of growth? Must the agricultural poor seeking a better life make due indefinitely as subsistence-wage earners in nascent manufacturing industries to speed the domestic accumulation of capital? Can everyone win, albeit some perhaps more than others, without anyone necessarily losing?

Just as in every other human endeavor, the production and distribution of foodstuffs adheres to certain basic economic principles. Unlike other kinds of competitive markets, though, the dynamics of supply and demand for agricultural goods do not always optimize resource allocation or maximize productive capacity. The most vexing problem here has to do with pricing. Left to its own devices, a commodity market regularly pays out a return that does not even cover the farmer's production costs. Truly efficient farming these days is also far more capital-intensive than it is labor-intensive. Profitability largely depends on successfully leveraging ever larger economies-of-scale and more cost-effective technology. Yet, most of the world's farmers still till small plots by hand.

Climate change is moving to the top of humankind's priorities list as the debate over whether it exists or not gives way to the debate over how best to forestall and counteract its more onerous effects. In this regard, the possible economic impacts of action or inaction have been discussed far less than the science, for the fact of the matter is that no one really knows for sure what changes lie in store for producers, markets, and consumers. That there will be profound structural changes is less in doubt than whether we collectively are up to the task of successfully dealing with global warming. Here, fortunately, we have a large body of research to fall back on, most notably the welfare economics of Pigou and Hicks and sustainable-development theory, to guide our decision making.

Economics as a discipline and body of theory goes back many centuries. Over the years, many ideas put forward have been discredited or downplayed by successors. Others have withstood the test of time, in part because they illuminate a fundamental economic process or mechanism and in part because no one has yet convincingly disproved them. Like most fields of human endeavor, brilliant minds over the course of centuries have shaped and reshaped our thinking on the workings of the marketplace. This evolution is most clearly evident in the changing views held about price central to the theory of value and the efficient allocation of resources.

Judging the value of anything on the basis of its carbon-footprint or toxic byproducts as much as on its inherent utility may well help to re-define the provisioning of public goods. After all, businesses survive and prosper by meeting consumer needs and preferences. Traditional welfare economics, though, preaches that problems like global warming are the direct result of market failures that only government intervention can reverse. Yet, business may nonetheless play a major role provided that it convinces policymakers and consumers alike of its environmental bona fides. Industry self regulation in general and third-party accreditation schemes like the construction industry's LEED certification program in particular may well do exactly that.

Monetary policy sets the upward limit of money in the form of cash, demand depots, time deposits, and equities allowed to circulate in the economy at large. It is the preserve of a central bank and can be used to either expand or contract economic activity. The goal in either case is to induce a macroeconomic change in output, national income, inflation or unemployment in both the short and near term. Over the last sixty years, the precepts and fundamentals of such major schools of economic thought as Keynesianism and Monetarism have entered into its formulation with limited success, occasioning a shift in recent years towards a far more pragmatic reliance on interest rates to achieve short-term goals.

Many of us have felt powerfully attracted to and in "love" with somebody more than once in our lives. To make sense of the raw emotion experienced during such times, we invariably turn to culturally-mediated constructs—love at first sight, true love, Christian love, etc. Sociologists in turn try to make sense of each amid love and attraction's unique features, and shed light on our underlying motives for and subjective experience of desire. Indeed, at first glance contemporary culture seems head-over-heels in love with love. And for good reason, for there are few experiences that match its intensity, that bring us more delight and despair, that confound and conflict us more.

The term informal economy refer to every kind of training that happens "off the books." The jobs people work, the businesses that employ them, the goods and services they produce are not accounted for in official records and data— such economic activity is untaxed and unregulated. Large informal economies exist in developed and developing countries alike. Often, informal economies arise because they meet the needs that their formal counterparts cannot.

Part philosophy, part social theory, historical materialism is a formal construct Karl Marx developed to explain the why and the how of economic and social change. It is based on the premise that we all derive our meaning from the physical world in general and define ourselves by what we produce. But the means and manner of this production never remain static for long, so internal conflict is unavoidable. All well and good says Marx, since it invariably leads to wider political and social change.

Karl Marx was both a philosopher and a political agitator. He thus often thought about questions relating to social change and revolution. However, Marx was not content to analyze each in isolation as if it were a self-contained idea. Like every other idea he pondered, Marx examined social change and revolution in light of his all-encompassing theory which sought to explain how societies progress materially, economically, and socio-politically. Within his system social change is a by-product of class struggle and revolution that is as much a permanent state of mind as an actual event marking capitalism's anticlimactic end.

Marx today is remembered not for his political writings but for the keen observations about society, class structure, and the plight of the increasingly alienated individual. It might thus come as a surprise to learn that he considered economics to be the driving force responsible for all these phenomena, a force what's more beyond mankind's control. Or to be exact early nineteenth century economics which did not considered price a function of market supply and demand but rather of the amount of labor expended manufacturing a saleable commodity. Unlike free-market advocates who also subscribed to this idea, Marx thought that it would be abused and undermined by an exploitive capitalist system where the need for ever greater levels of investment would come out of the very pockets of the workers who give everything value.