Most modern scholars who engage with Ibn Khaldun’s work consider him a social historian whose work is useful in that it sheds light on events and institutions they wish to reference. A close comparison between the original Arabic text of his seminal work, al-Muqaddima and some of the secondary sources that interpreted it reveals significant misinterpretation. Here, Ibn Khaldun’s reliance on systems thinking and his original ideas in relations to some of the most consequential areas of social activities and human behavior are highlighted. This article deliberately avoids the reductionist approach that focuses on a single idea, imposing it as being Ibn Khaldun’s unique original contribution, but, instead, tracks with key ideas as presented in Ibn Khaldun's section on economics in his Muqaddima.