Economics
A social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth. It is a relatively new academic discipline: the first major book on Economics, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776.
There is an economic aspect to almost any topic one can think of - Education, Religion, Politics, Employment, Transport, Defense, etc.
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. Earlier forms of social organization are chiefly discussed in terms of their transition to societies based on the exchange of commodities.
One of the guiding ideas in Economics is scarcity. Virtually everything is scarce; there are not enough resources around the world to satisfy humanity. It is not only the poor who feel deprived; even the relatively well-off seem to want more. It is the economists job to evaluate the choices that exist for the use of those resources.
The traditional major divisions of Economics include Microeconomics, which deals with the behaviour of individual consumers, companies, traders, and farmers; and Macroeconomics, which focuses on aggregates such as the level of income in an economy, the volume of total employment, and the flow of investment. Another branch, Development Economics, investigates the history and changes of economic activity and organization over a period of time, as well as their relation to other activities and institutions. Within these three major divisions there are specialized areas of study that attempt to answer questions on a broad spectrum of human economic activity, including public finance, money supply and banking, international trade, labor, industrial organization, and Agriculture. The areas of investigation in Economics overlap with other social sciences, particularly Political Science, but Economics is primarily concerned with relations between buyer and seller or within markets that encompass those actors.
History of Economics -- Microeconomics -- Macroeconomics -- Development Economics -- Recession -- inflation -- Market forms -- Keynesian economics -- Austrian School -- Finance -- factors of production