What is the best description of economics?

Question

What is the best description of economics?

Answer 1

All societies must make choices about how to use their scare resources.  Economics is the study of how people and societies deal with scarcity.  Microeconomics focuses on individual decision-making units (i.e. households, firms) and how the individual decisions fit together and what kind of results they produce.  The questions about scarcity and allocation are 1) What is to be produced? 2) How is it to be produced? 3) Who gets the output?  Macroeconomics focuses on the behavior of the economy as a whole (i.e. inflation, unemployment, and the business cycle).