AN APPROACH TO THE ECONOMIC SCIENCE

Sometimes when I say I am Economist or that I studied Economics, I try to guess what the people I’m talking to are thinking. I guess some people think of the brokers working in the stock market, other think of the bankers, other think of a man in a desk working at a computer surrounded by numbers, others I am sure they think I am Lucifer himself.

The Economics is a science. Within all the sciences is classified in the social sciences group. Being a social science implies that it studies human behavior.

The most commonly accepted current definition is Lionel Robbins’ one; “Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses”.*

Economics studies human behavior, which involves the study of the individual human being and its relationship with the resources and how it uses them. The people understand resources as material goods the most of the times, but they are making economic decisions every day with their time. Yes, the time is our most scarce resource and we are deciding every day what we are doing with it.

We take these decisions to get Utility. According to the Oxford Dictionary Online; Utility is the state of being useful, profitable, or beneficial**. Some people think of the utility and the benefit just as a money concept, but utility and benefit is measured for the grade of satisfaction that you get from a good or service. To get a smile from a child when it’s riding your bicycle and barely can pedal because it’s so small it is something that has an utility for you, no for everyone of course, but yes for a part of the population.

The Economics study the utility of the groups adding individual utilities. Even every person is unique and adding utilities sometimes is like adding pears with apples, but this is the only way that we have to evaluate the demand and the supply.

After I have explained how we start to analyze and describe all the economic problems we found everyday in the study of the human and the economy, you can understand that that Economics is not an exact science. But those problems are not so different with the problems that a physicist can find talking about the Higgs boson or a paleontologist can find talking about where the homo sapiens is descending from or an astronomer talking how far away a star is (when they do that for estimations) or even the mathematics has improvements every year.

Finally I have to accept that every scientist in the past and today still is sometimes underestimates for people that they are afraid of change and the improvements of the knowledge, as well I have to accept that we are humans and we make mistakes in our analysis.

PS. Thanks Michelle for your help with the grammar.