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Текст 1.2. «What Exactly is Economics?»

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(1) The English word “economics” comes from the Greek words “oikos” (house), and “nemos” (norms), which roughly means “household management”.

(2) There’s no one universally accepted answer to the question “What is economics?” There are many definitions, past and present, which have been applied to the term economics.

Still, broadly speaking, economics is a social science, a “school of thought” or “theory”, and its area of study is human activity involved in meeting people’s needs and wants. Economics tells us how people and economies normally behave, and why they behave like that/the way they do, and predicts what will result if certain economic factors are disturbed or changed.

(3) Two of the earliest definitions of economics were offered by Adam Smith (1723-1790), who is generally regarded/known as the father of economics. These definitions are based on the notion of wealth, and are as follows: “the science of wealth” and “the science relating to the laws of production, distribution and exchange (of wealth)”. Some academic dictionaries still define economics as “a social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services and their management” or as “the science of how people produce goods and services, how they distribute them among themselves, and how they use them”, while modern academic definitions of economics involve mostly the notions of scarcity and choice.

(4) Though the exact wording differs from author to author, the standard definition of economics in terms of scarcity and choice is something like this: “Economics is a social science which examines how people choose to use limited or scarce resources in an effort/in order to satisfy their unlimited wants.” This scarcity(-based) definition of economics means that people’s resources are scarce, and whenever an individual, a business, or a nation faces a competing alternative, a choice must be made. From this point of view, economics is essentially the study of choice and decision-making in a world with scarce or limited resources.

(5) Any modern economy can be represented as a two-level arrangement. The lower level of an economy is known as a microeconomy, which is the subject matter of microeconomics or microeconomic theory. The upper level is called a macroeconomy, which is the subject matter of macroeconomics or macroeconomic theory. Two of the intermediate, and relatively new, fields of economic study are meso- and megaeconomics. Since modern economic analysis focuses on decision-making, it is often applied to most different fields of human activity.

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