what is economics?
The nature of economics. Economics is the scientific study of the ownership, use, and exchange of scarce resources-often shortened to the science of scarcity. Economics is regarded as a social science because it uses scientific methods to build theories that can help explain the behaviour of individuals, groups and organisations. Economics attempts to explain economic behaviour, which arises when scarce resources are exchanged. In terms of methodology, economists, like other social scientists, are not able to undertake controlled experiments in the way that chemists and biologists are.
Economics can generally be broken down into: macroeconomics, which concentrates on the behavior of the aggregate economy; and microeconomics, which focuses on individual consumers. Economics is often referred to as the dismal science .. Next Up.