Макроэкономика

Содержание

Although the content and character of economics cannot be described briefly, numerous writers have attempted that. An especially useless, though once popular, example is: «Economics is what economists do.»

Similarly, a notable economist of the last century Alfred Marshall called economics «a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.* Lionel Robbins in the 1930s described economics as «the science of choice among scarce means to accomplish unlimited ends.»

During much of modern history, especially in the nineteenth century, economics was called simply «the science of wealth.* Less seriously, George Bernard Shaw was credited in the early 1900s with the witticism that «economics is the science whose practitioners, even if all were laid end to end, would not reach agreement.*

Economics deals with data on income, employment, expenditure, interest rates, prices and individual activities of production, consumption, transportation, and trade. Economics deals directly with only a tiny fraction of the whole spectrum of human behavior, and so the range of problems considered by economists is relatively narrow. Contrary to popular opinion, economics does not normally include such things as personal finance, ways to start a small business, etc.; in relation to everyday life, the economist is more like an astronomer than a weatherforecaster, more like a physical chemist than a pharmacist, more like a professor of hydrodynamics than a plumber.

In principle almost any conceivable problem, from marriage, suicide, capital punishment, and religious observance to tooth brushing, drug abuse, extramarital affairs, and mall shopping, might serve (and, in the case of each of these examples has served) as an object for some economist’s attention. There is, after all, no clear division between «economic» and «noneconomic» phenomena.