Economics is a social science which studies the allocation of scarce resources.
Contents |
The traditional major divisions of Economics include:
Within these three major divisions there are specialized areas of study that try to answer questions on a broad spectrum of human economic activity, including public finance, the money supply and banking, international trade, labor, industrial organization, and Agriculture.
There has been an increasing trend for ideas from economics to be applied in wider contexts. There is an economic aspect to almost any topic one can think of - Education, Religion, Politics, Employment, Transport, Defense, the Environment, etc.
Macroeconomic International -- Macroeconomic Theory -- Monetary -- Monetarism--Gresham's law -- Inflation -- IS/LM model -- Recession -- Depression
Microeconomic Labor -- Environmental --Industrial -- Microeconomic Theory -- Public Finance--Resource economics -- Welfare economics-- market forms -- Factors of production -- Financial economics -- Connectivity -- Network effect
Mathematical Econometrics -- Game Theory
Selected Topics History of Economic Thought -- Economic history -- Environmental economics-- capitalism -- communism -- economists -- Nobel prize in economic sciences Comparative Economic Systems -- Developmental economics
There are a number of competing approaches to the study of economics:
Many economists use a combination of Neoclassical and Keynesian ideas. This combination of ideas, sometimes known as the Neoclassical synthesis, was particularly dominant in the years following World War 2.
Other schools of thought associated with Neoclassical economics:
Other schools of thought associated with Keynesian economics include:
Further alternative schools of economic thought include:
Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. It is a social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth.
The most primitive hunter-gatherer band has an economy but, because the discipline begins with the study of trading societies, its most detailed and precise work has dealt with the institutions belonging to them. Modern economics tends to discuss earlier forms of social organization chiefly in terms of their transition to societies based on the exchange of commodities.
One of the guiding ideas in Economics is scarcity. Almost everything is scarce; there are too few resources to satisfy all of humanity. It's not only the poor who feel deprived; even those better well-off seem to want more. It is the economist's job to evaluate the choices that exist for the use of those resources and choose those which maximise societal welfare.
A more modern aspect of Economics is the concept of incentives, which guide the choices made by economic agents.
The areas of investigation in Economics overlap with other social sciences like Political science, but Economics focuses on relations between buyer and seller or within markets for those actors. The study of how political relations affect economics is political economy, which is generally concerned with measurement and valuation relationships between factors of production, as enforced or imposed by a political regime.
The earliest economic theories were closely tied to the theological debates of the Scholastics, and to various theories of the state. During the Enlightenment, the French physiocrats and such luminaries as Richard Cantillon and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot were among the first to consider economics in and of itself. They were soon overshadowed by Adam Smith's [[An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations]], published in 1776. Today it is customary to consider Smith the founder of economic theory - and his classical economics to be the beginnings of formal economic study.
What are our priorities for writing in this area? To help develop a list of the most basic topics in Economics, please see Economics basic topics.