ABSTRACT
The branch of social science called ‘economics’ is commonly described as the study of how humans make use of available productive resources (including their own labour and skills) to produce goods and services for human use. This is partly a technical question of the relationship between ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ but it becomes a matter of social science, rather than physics or engineering, because humans practise a high degree of functional specialization. This raises the questions of how the specialized economic activities of individuals are co-ordinated into an orderly system; how different systems of co-ordination work; and what defects or deficiencies a particular system has and how they may be corrected.
