Concept
Economics
Overview
Economics () is a social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyses what is viewed as the basic elements of economies, including individual agents and markets, their interactions, and the outcomes of those interactions. Individual agents may include households, firms, buyers, and sellers. Macroeconomics analyses economies as systems where production, distribution, consumption, savings, and investment expenditure interact; and the factors of production affecting them, such as: labour, capital, land, and enterprise, inflation, economic growth, and public policies that impact these elements. It also seeks to analyse and describe the global economy.
Other broad distinctions within economics include those between positive economics, describing "what is", and normative economics, advocating "what ought to be"; between economic theory and applied economics; between rational and behavioural economics; and between mainstream economics and heterodox economics.
Economic analysis can be applied throughout society, including business, finance, cybersecurity, health care, engineering and government. It is also applied to such diverse subjects as crime, education, the family, feminism, law, philosophy, politics, religion, social institutions, war, science, and the environment.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Economics is discussed.
Germany enriched herself by bounty-fed beet sugar. England enriched herself by exploiting foreign markets. What was possible for a compact area is not possible for an area 1,900 miles long and 1,500 broad. The economics of a nation are determined by its climatic, geological and temperamental conditions. The Indian conditions are different from the English in all these essentials. What is meat for England is in many…
Mahatma Gandhi, The Wheel of Fortune
a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
That they arise and become urgent in us of course does human nature unimpeachable credit and economics must by all means wait respectfully upon their settlement. So much is conceded. But economics is economics, when all is said and done. What we mean by the economic interest is an interest in the direct and several satisfactions that a man can get from the several things he shrewdly finds it worth his while to pay…
John Dewey, Creative Intelligence
states what it is; names the idea
Between the producer and the product distribution steps in, which determines by social laws his share in the world of products; that is to say, distribution steps in between production and consumption. Does distribution form an independent sphere standing side by side with and outside of production? _b. Production and Distribution._ In perusing the common treatises on economics one can not help being struck with the…
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
author linked in the graph; names the idea
As might be expected, the most imperfect part of those branches of social inquiry which have been cultivated as separate sciences, is the theory of the manner in which their conclusions are affected by ethological considerations. The omission is no defect in them as abstract or hypothetical sciences, but it vitiates them in their practical application as branches of a comprehensive social science. In political…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
states what it is; author linked in the graph
Most of the conclusions of social science applicable to practical use are of this description. M. Comte's system makes no room for them. We have seen how he deals with the part of them which are the most scientific in character, the generalizations of political economy.
John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism
author linked in the graph
Philosophers who discussed Economics
- R. H. Tawney
- Bernard Lonergan
- Pierre Bourdieu
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- René Girard
- Roberto Mangabeira Unger
- James Mill
- Cesare Beccaria
- Richard Price
- William Whewell
- Hans-Hermann Hoppe
- Charles Fourier
- Robert Nozick
- Aristotle
- Karl Jaspers
- Alfred North Whitehead
- Jeremy Bentham
- Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
- Peter Kropotkin
- The Order of Things
- Peter Hacker
- Jacques Maritain
- Immanuel Wallerstein
- Friedrich Pollock
Related ideas
- Austrian school of economics
- Georg Simmel
- Vladimir Lenin
- Distribution of wealth
- Falsifiability
- Friedrich Hayek
- Game theory
- Thomas Carlyle
- Polis
- Hesiod
- Equity (economics)
- Goods and services
- Interest
- Ancient Greek
- Public policy
- John Stuart Mill
- Joseph Schumpeter
- John von Neumann
- Laissez-faire
- Karl Marx
- Philosophy and economics
- Rosa Luxemburg
- Paradigm
- Labor theory of value
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Action theory (philosophy).