ABSTRACT
An understanding of the highly complex societal processes of human provisioning, which may also call “the economy,” can be approached in various ways. In many respects, the economy is viewed as a system of power, and, concomitantly, of powerlessness. Proponents of appropriate mixed economies are adherents to a volitional, pragmatic and essentially democratic perspective on human societies in which the community makes and remakes itself. The study of the mixed economy is, in large part, the study of public processes of attaining public objectives; and the nature of the mixed economy is a complex web of private and public institutions and policies that seem best able, at a particular time, to move the community “forward.” A satisfactory economy must provide an adequate quantity and assortment of goods and services, produced in ways consistent with a community’s sense of productive efficiency.
