To develop theories that explain the distribution of goods and services within a society, as well as theories that define how goods and services should be distributed.

How are goods and services produced, distributed and consumed within any given society? How should they be? What is the best way to determine what people should get and how they should be allowed to get it? For example, to what extent, should people be encouraged to pursue wealth and power principally for their own benefit? To what extent, on the other hand, should society try to provide equal access to education, wealth, and power? What are the strengths and weaknesses of competing economic theories?

Economists from differing schools of thought disagree on the information they use in reasoning through economic problems. Those who favor capitalism, for example, focus on information about supply of products versus demand, consumer preferences, consumer spending, business investments, and government support of business. In solving economic problems, they emphasize information about how to keep aggregate demand high. Those who favor socialism focus on information that reveals the impact of the distribution of wealth on the well-being of everyone, especially the poor and disadvantaged. Their ideal is to distribute wealth so that resources are made available as equally as possible, taking into account the crucial problem of how to motivate people to contribute to the well-being of others as well as themselves. The information that economists use is ultimately determined by the way they conceptualize ideal economic systems and the questions implied by the economic theories that guide their thinking.

Economists make inferences about how best to stabilize and enhance the distribution, production, and use of goods and services. They make these inferences in accordance with their economic philosophies, considering trends and patterns of individual business and government spending, economic health, and distribution of wealth.

Economics is the study of how goods, services and resources are/should be distributed and used within human societies. Leading economic concepts have evolved, especially through the last 200 years. Some of them are: the principle of competition, law of supply and demand, utilitarianism, capitalism, socialism, communism, marxism, exploitation, class conflict between economic strata (especially between workers and employers), private property, free markets, self-interest, psychological variables influencing economic behavior, assumption of scarcity, law of diminishing returns, principles of marginal utility and productivity, aggregate demand, labor theory of value, Malthusian population doctrine, and Keynesian economics.

By studying the ways and means for distributing goods and services, economic systems can become more stable and more fair to the people who vie for resources within those systems. Beyond this shared assumption, economists’ assumptions differ according to their philosophies, values, and theories. Those who favor capitalism assume that humans are fundamentally selfish and that only a system that utilizes the driving force of human selfishness will be realistic. Socialists, in contrast, assume that education can be used to shift the emphasis in human activity from self-aggrandizement to altruism.

The implications that economic theories generate vary from theory to theory. Which of the theoretical implications are likely to become actual consequences are a matter of continual debate. The debate focuses on what actual consequences seem to be accounted for by this or that economic theory and what consequences (good or bad) result from variables other than those postulated by a given theory. For example, did the Great Depression of the 1930s result from a deep flaw in capitalist theory, or did it result from a failure to practice the theory thoroughly enough?

Economists look at the distribution of goods and services within a society, along with the distribution of power that distribution entails, as a crucial object of systematic study.