THE SCOPE OF ECONOMICS

Most students taking economics for the first time are surprised by the breadth of what they study. Some think that economics will teach them about the stock market or what to do with their money. Others think that economics deals exclusively with problems like inflation and unemployment. In fact, it deals with all these subjects, but they are pieces of a much larger puzzle.

Economics has deep roots in, and close ties to, social philosophy. An issue of great importance to philosophers, for example, is distributional justice. Why are some people rich and others poor, and whatever the answer, is this fair? A number of nineteenth century social philosophers wrestled with these questions, and out of their musings economics as a separate discipline was born. The easiest way to get a feel for the breadth and depth of what you will be studying is to explore briefly the way economics is organized. First of all, there are two major divisions of economics: microeconomics and macroeconomics.

Microeconomics deals with the functioning of individual industries and the behaviour of individual economic decision-making units: single business firms and households. Microeconomics explores the decisions that individual businesses and consumers make. The choices of firms about what to produce and how much to charge and the choices of households about what to buy and how much of it to buy help to explain why the economy produces the things it does. Another big question that microeconomics addresses is who gets the things that are produced. Wealthy households get more output than do poor households, and the forces that determine this distribution of output are the province of microeconomics. Why do we have poverty? Who is poor? Why do some jobs pay more than others? Why do teachers or plumbers or baseball pitchers get paid what they do? Think again about all the things you consume in a day, and then think back to that view out over a big city. Somebody decided to build those factories. Somebody decided to construct the roads, build the housing, produce the cars, knit the shirts, and smoke the bacon. Why? What is going on in all those buildings? It is easy to see that understanding individual micro decisions is very important to any understanding of your society.

Macroeconomics, in its turn, deals with the functioning of national economic complex and the behavior of the main classes and social groups.

HOW TO STUDY ECONOMICS?

The study of economics should begin with a sense of wonder. Pause for a moment and consider a typical day in your life. For breakfast you might have bread made in a local bakery with flour produced in Minnesota from wheat grown in Kansas and bacon from pigs raised in Ohio, packaged in plastic made in New Jersey. You spill coffee from Colombia on your shirt made in Texas from textiles shipped from South Carolina. After class you drive with a friend in a Japanese car on an interstate highway system that took 20 years and billions of dollars worth of resources to build. You stop for gasoline refined in Louisiana from Saudi Arabian crude oil brought to the United States on a supertanker that took three years to build at a shipyard in Maine. At night you call your brother in Mexico City. The call travels over newly laid fiber-optic cable to a powerful antenna that sends it to a transponder on one of over 1.000 communications satellites orbiting the earth.

You use or consume tens of thousands of things, both tangible and intangible, every day: buildings, the music of a rock band, the compact disc it is recorded on, telephone services, staples, paper, toothpaste, tweezers, soap, a digital watch, fire protection, antacid tablets, beer, banks, electricity, eggs, insurance, football fields, computers, buses, rugs, subways, health services, sidewalks, and so forth. One hundred twenty million people in the United States - almost half the total population - work at hundreds of thousands of different kinds of jobs producing nearly six trillion dollars worth of goods and services every year. Some cannot find work; some choose not to work for pay. Some are rich, others are poor.

The United States imports $60 billion worth of petroleum and petroleum products each year and exports $37 billion worth of food. High-rise office buildings go up in central cities. Condominiums and homes are built in the suburbs. In other places homes are abandoned and boarded up. Some countries are wealthy. Others are impoverished. Some are growing. Some are stagnating. Some businesses are doing well. Others are going bankrupt.

Economics is the study of how individuals and societies choose to use the scarce resources that nature and previous generations have provided. The key word in this definition is “choose”. Economics is a behavioural science. In large measure it is the study of how people make choices. The choices that people make, when added up, translate into societal choices.