ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses certain variable characteristics of great area of study coming under the general heading "comparative economic systems," namely, study of relationships between economic and political systems. The relationships between economic and political systems are direction of flow of causation, flexibility of economic and political system concepts, concrete versus environments, and variable routes of the flow of causation. The concepts of economic and political systems are so flexible that questions about systems' relationships can be highly varied for this general reason alone, without the benefit of other sources of difference. Methods of reasoning employed by analysts of systems' interrelationships also have varied greatly. General types include: tautology, inference from a case study, deduction from generalizations about how persons, groups, organizations, and whole societies behave, and a sort of statistical approach. A tautological proposition is one that, in itself, says nothing about the universe but states only definitional relationships.
