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Economics as a social
science, studies the production, distribution,
and consumption of resources.
The word "economics" is from the Greek words οἶκος [oikos], meaning "family, household, estate," and
νόμος [nomos], or "custom, law," and
hence literally means "household management" or "management of
the state." |
An economist is a person using economic concepts and data in the course of employment.
The field may be divided in several different ways, most popularly microeconomics (at the level of individual choices) vs macroeconomics (aggregate results). It may also be divided in positive (descriptive) vs. normative, mainstream vs. heterodox,
and by subfield. Economics has many direct applications in business, personal
finance, and government. Theories developed as a part of economic theory have
also been applied to non-monetary choices in fields as diverse as criminal
behavior, scientific research, death, politics, health, education, family,
dating, etc. This is allowed because economics is fundamentally about human
decision making.
There has been an increasing trend for ideas and methods from economics to be
applied in wider contexts. Economic analysis focuses on decision making, and has
been applied, with varying degrees of success, to various fields where people
are faced with alternatives – education, marriage, health, law, crime, war, and religion.
This has sometimes been described as economic imperialism by critics. Gary
Becker at the University of Chicago was one of the important pioneers in
this imperialistic endeavor. In a collection of his early influential articles,
he advanced the view that economics is not to be defined by its subject matters,
but should be defined as an approach of explaining human behaviors.
Economics is usually divided into two main branches:
- Microeconomics examines the economic behaviour of individual units such as businesses and
households in face of scarcity and government interactions, as well as the
economic consequences of these decisions on other actors.
- Macroeconomics examines an economy as a whole with a view to understanding the interaction
between economic aggregates such as national
income, employment and inflation.
Note that general
equilibrium theory combines concepts of a macro-economic view of the
economy, but does so from the microeconomic viewpoint.
Economics -
Wikipedia
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