What Economics Is?

Why some nations prospered while others lagged behind in poverty? How the global financial crisis occurred? And how can we take measures to prevent the recurrence of crisis in the future? Taking with these questions, people pay more attention to the insight of economies. Thus, economics plays more and more important roles to help people understand how the economy works in real world. In order to insight into the economics, this essay will explain and state my view of what economics is, along with how will the economics help me in my future career or daily life.

What economics is? In my view, firstly, economics is not a natural science but a social science. For a long time, numerous literatures have long debated for the topic of whether economics is a science. To some extent, economics resembles a science; it deals with economic entity and their mutual relations. As Blaug Mark said that economists are ultimately in the business of understanding how the economy works in the same way that a physicist or a biologist is engaged in understanding how nature works. However, unlike physics whose theories or hypotheses could be tested by doing controlled experiments, economics is widely regarded as a non-experimental science that has to rely on the observation or statistics of real-world economies rather than controlled experiments to draw conclusions. In addition, human emotions and human behavior seem have effects on the entire economic activity. Economists can not completely theorize and predict an economic activity with mathematical precision. As argued by Mises, human beings are faced with a fundamental choice. All people’s choice of ends are subjected to their decision. Thus, economic activity contains subjective choice of human action. As advocated by Gene Callahan, economics is not a theory of everything, but a theory of consequences of choice. Therefore, if economics is a science, it should leave aside human actions of choice from economic activities. However,...