ABSTRACT
A perfectly competitive economy, marked by a great many small producers each with no perceptible market power, effectively serves the material interests of the “sovereign” consumer. Perfect competition has an extensive and familiar rhetoric, serving the needs of clients, instituting best- and least-cost production methods, free entry of new firms to ensure ability to adapt, and so on. Certain critical elements of economic theory and economic society have evolved from their initial origins to take on very different meanings as people consider the modern globalizing economy. The six phases of development for economic societies are cave economics, tribal economics, village economics, city economics, national economics and global economics. Nationalism has been praised and reviled as being responsible for much of what defines human as a culture, both good and bad. Up to the emergence of the nation-state, economic philosophy and practice still basically served individual people and various private groups or classes.
