what is economics the typical firste student walks into his first economics class with very little idea of what economics is he might have heard something like economics is the study of money or economics is another word for accounting or economics is hard don't take that class but none of those are true economics is the study of the use of scarce resources that have alternative uses that's the class classic definition of economics basically there are people and people need resources to fulfill their desires these resources cannot be infinite but the desires can be so people need to make choices about how to use their scarce resources economists study these choices all economic questions fall into one of two categories positive and normative positive economics describes what is and normative economics argues for what ought to be so a question like why do people use money is a positive question and should people use money is a normative question a general rule of thumb is that if your economic model has no value judgments it's positive economics whereas if it does have value judgments it's normative economics since to tell someone what he ought to do you first have to judge what is best for him economics is also divided into microeconomics and macroeconomics microeconomics studies the behavior of individual agents and markets while macroeconomics studies the behavior of the entire economy economists also have their own branch of Statistics called econometrics that specialize to analyzing economic data since economic data usually comes from The Real World and not from controlled experim erment econometrics faces mathematical challenges that other fields might not the tools economists have developed to study human behavior of broad uses outside of what we would traditionally consider economics economists study not only markets but things like crime War the family religion culture politics law and even genetics that's why it's not unusual to see papers by psychologists sociologist ologists criminologists political scientists anthropologists biologists neuroscientists or legal Scholars being co-authored by economists