2 ms·

I always thought that economics was the study of how wealth/resources travel through the population.

• dredmorbius 14y ago
  No, though that's a component of it (usually social economics or social equity). The broadest definition of economics is "the study of the allocation of scarce resources" (from Samuelson's classic text), or "studying the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services" (Wikipedia). Not to be confused with finance: "how investors allocate their (money and other) assets over time under conditions of certainty and uncertainty" (Wikipedia). Prior to the 19th Century, equity ("positive") of distribution -- how wealth should be distributed -- was a much larger component of economic thought (from Greek/Roman times and before). Even Adam Smith addresses this at great length. Since the 19th century, and particularly through much of the 20th and 21st, "normative" economics (describing how things are rather than how they should be) has been more in vogue, though there's some backlash against this particularly since wage stagnation and reversal in the lower quintiles of the population in the US since the 1970s.