Economics is a concept that many people are not very vested in and many people would assume that economics is completely useless for the average person. Where is the point at looking at complex graphs, charts, and things like finance? To the average person, this appears to be some overly complicated mess simply made up by people in order to confuse the average Joe. However, at his most basic premise and on the smallest level, economics can be pretty important as well as useful to understand on a fundamental level. Speaking of a fundamental level, at its most basic, economics isn’t really that complicated. According to the economics' website Investopedia, economics is simply a social science concerned with studying how goods and services are produced and distributed among a community. A similar definition is shown from the Merriam-Webster dictionary: " a science concerned with the process or system by which goods and services are produced, sold, and bought". Basically, how a community gives out resources and services is economics. If you study how your neighborhood handles resources during a crisis or how people in your city get the services they need from the people around them, you’re basically studying economics without knowing it. While mostly focus on human behavior, there are people who have looked at apes, dolphins, and other intelligent animals to study their economics & how animals distribute resources in various different environments/circumstances.
There are two basic categories that you can separate economics into. One of these forms of economics is microeconomics, which mainly focuses on the behavior of individual customers and consumers. It also tends to focus on the economies of small communities such as neighborhoods, expanded families, and local municipalities. Meanwhile, if you are interested in the economy at large or the economies of major nations, you would probably prefer to study macroeconomics. With that, you look at economics from the perspective of a larger region, nation, or a full-blown international scale. These two forms of economics can also be divided into various different subcategories, but these are the two most basic ways to look at economic policies.
People have been trying to understand how the exchange of resources works exactly since early times. In fact, one of the earliest recorded economic thinkers can be traced all the way back to 8th century BC in ancient Greece. Hesiod was an early economist and an ancient poet who wanted to take a look at how labor, materials, and time to maintain a community would be allocated efficiently to overcome times of scarcity and issues with the human condition (i.e. people who might not be able to provide assistance or aid due to physical disabilities, those who might not want to work or help due to mental disorders that makes it harder for them to empathize with others, waste of resources). Later, we had other people who would talk about philosophy with people like Adam Smith writing about economics and his 1776 book ‘The Wealth of Nations’. There are also various different types of economic systems that have been invented by mankind. You have systems such as capitalism, socialism, communism, distributism, feudalism, mercantilism, and plenty more that people rarely ever talk about but have been theorized to potentially work on a larger scale. I might possibly write some articles and talk about some of these economic systems in the future, but be warned. A lot of what I will write will be a mouthful since many economic systems are pretty complex and various different theories can be implemented about the exact nature of each economic system. Also, there are some subsystems within each economic system that can be vastly different from one one another. For example, Marx’s socialism is very different from pension fund market socialism with the only relation being collective ownership of the means of production by community. A mixed economy form of capitalism is going to have a decent number of differences from objectivism, with the ability to own private property under a market economy being the only connective tissue. On top of that, most of my stories will probably give a cursory introduction to the systems, so they will probably not be as in-depth as many supporters, detractors, or people who are just interested in economics would probably like them to be.
