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Last Updated: Dec 22, 2021
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economics, social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production,
distribution, and consumption of wealth. In the 19th century economics was the
hobby of gentlemen of leisure and the vocation of a few academics; economists wrote
about economic policy but were rarely consulted by legislators before decisions were
made. Today there is hardly a government, international agency, or large commercial
bank that does not have its own staff of economists. Many of the world’s economists
devote their time to teaching economics in colleges and universities around the
world, but most work in various research or advisory capacities, either for
themselves (in economics consulting firms), in industry, or in government. Still
others are employed in accounting, commerce, marketing, and business
administration; although they are trained as economists, their occupational expertise
falls within other fields. Indeed, this can be considered “the age of economists,” and
the demand for their services seems insatiable. Supply responds to that demand, and
in the United States alone some 400 institutions of higher learning grant about 900
new Ph.D.’s in economics each year.

Definition
No one has ever succeeded in neatly defining the scope of economics. Many have
agreed with Alfred Marshall, a leading 19th-century English economist, that
economics is “a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life; it examines that
part of individual and social action which is most closely connected with the
attainment, and with the use of the material requisites of wellbeing”—ignoring the
fact that sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists frequently study exactly the
same phenomena. In the 20th century, English economist Lionel Robbins defined
economics as “the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between
(given) ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” In other words, Robbins
said that economics is the science of economizing. While his definition captures one
of the striking characteristics of the economist’s way of thinking, it is at once too
wide (because it would include in economics the game of chess) and too narrow
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(because it would exclude the study of the national income or the price level).
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Perhaps the only foolproof definition is that attributed to Canadian-born economist
Jacob Viner: economics is what economists do.

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What is "The Great Moderation"? Which country in Europe doesn’t use the euro? Test your
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Difficult as it may be to define economics, it is not difficult to indicate the sorts of

questions that concern economists. Among other things, they seek to analyze the
forces determining prices—not only the prices of goods and services but the prices of
the resources used to produce them. This involves the discovery of two key elements:
what governs the way in which human labour, machines, and land are combined in
production and how buyers and sellers are brought together in a functioning market.
Because prices of the various things must be interrelated, economists therefore ask
how such a “price system” or “market mechanism” hangs together and what
conditions are necessary for its survival.

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These questions are representative of microeconomics, the part of economics that
deals with the behaviour of individual entities such as consumers, business firms,
traders, and farmers. The other major branch of economics is macroeconomics,
which focuses attention on aggregates such as the level of income in the whole
economy, the volume of total employment, the flow of total investment, and so forth.
Here economists are concerned with the forces determining the income of a country
or the level of total investment, and they seek to learn why full employment is so
rarely attained and what public policies might help a country achieve higher
employment or greater price stability.

But these examples still do not exhaust the range of problems that economists
consider. There is also the important field of development economics, which
examines the attitudes and institutions supporting the process of economic
development in poor countries as well as those capable of self-sustained economic
growth (for example, development economics was at the heart of the Marshall Plan).
In this field the economist is concerned with the extent to which the factors affecting
economic development can be manipulated by public policy.

Cutting across these major divisions in economics are the specialized fields of public
finance, money and banking, international trade, labour economics, agricultural
economics, industrial organization, and others. Economists are frequently consulted
to assess the effects of governmental measures such as taxation, minimum-wage
laws, rent controls, tariffs, changes in interest rates, changes in government budgets,
and so on.

Historical development of economics

The effective birth of economics as a separate discipline may be traced to the year
1776, when the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the
Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. There was, of course, economics before
Smith: the Greeks made significant contributions, as did the medieval scholastics,
and from the 15th to the 18th century an enormous amount of pamphlet literature
discussed and developed the implications of economic nationalism (a body of
thought now known as mercantilism). It was Smith, however, who wrote the first
full-scale treatise on economics and, by his magisterial influence, founded what later
generations were to Boost
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of classical political economy,” known
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today as classical economics.
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 zoom_in

Adam Smith
Adam Smith, paste medallion by James Tassie, 1787; in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery,
Edinburgh.
Image: Courtesy of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

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