1. Economic Systems

2. How about a quick field trip? Maybe a cruise would be fun.

3. Or not ► I’m afraid we’re all going to get to know each other a lot better.

4. What now? ► We know who will be in charge. ► But you guys will keep busy too!

5. Seriously though... ► We are going to have to put together an economy. ► What questions do we need to ask and answer.

6. 3 Basic Economic Questions ► There are three questions that all economies have to answer.

7. What will we produce? ► What goods and services do we need? What would we like to have with the resources we have left?

8. How will we produce it? ► What technologies will we use and how will we organize production?

9. How will we distribute what is produced? ► Who gets what? This is the one that gets really tense sometimes.

10. We classify economies not by what the answers to the questions are, but by who answers them. ► What are the possibilities?

11. The government can answer them. ► This is called a command economy, or sometimes a centrally planned economy. ► Communism is perhaps the most obvious example. ► Command economies are old though, like the tributary economy.

12. People can answer them for themselves. ► This is called a free market, or just market economy. ► We like to say our economy is a free market economy. Is it really?

13. There’s one other possibility. ► Dead people?!? ► If we just do what we’ve always done, we call it a traditional economy.

14. Most economies in the world today are really mixed economies. ► These combine elements of command, market, and even traditional economies.

15. How is the US economy one that mixes elements of all three? ► However, we lean most heavily to a market economy, least to traditional.