Economics has two broad disciplinces, micro and macro economics. Macro economics is for if you're trying to plan or consider the economy, micro economics is if

Economics has two broad disciplinces, micro and macro economics. Macro economics is for if you're trying to plan or consider the economy, micro economics is if you want to understand a business or person and how it makes decisions etc.,. Broadly, there's also normative and positive economics. Normative economics is stating opinions about what's right (e.g,. there should be a minimum wage so that no one can be paid less than X for their work) whereas positive economics is about facts (e.g., if you raise the price of something, you'll generally sell less of it). Anyway, idk if that's useful. I'd say though, economists don't really need to care about what people value, except to the extent that they can e.g,. learn about what people value by observing their behavior, or use how they ascribe value to something to predict their behavior. That is to say, "real" economists _do_ study allocations of physical resources etc., don't think they just try to model some theoretical value function :)