Economy as a Subsystem of the Society

Current state of both the economic theory and the economic practice requires not “minor repairs”, but the entire re-thinking of the foundations of the existence of economics as one of the social sub-systems in the unified system Nature-Society-Human. It is clear that the way to surmount the ongoing economic collapse should be searched not in other “methods ” of implementation of the principles that led to it, but in finding new principles of the whole economic system. As one of the possible variants of considering the problem we propose the author’s concept of the knowledge-based economy in accordance to which the scientific knowledge is viewed as the key resource of the formation of the social wealth, and the process of its production is considered to be an integrated technological chain consisting of the mental, information and material productions. This approach brings about the necessity of radical reconsideration of the whole system of economic categories and the models, methods, criteria and indicators based on this system. At the same time it provides us with simple guidelines in the complex theoretical disputes and in the practical activities aimed at forming the basics of the knowledge-based economy