What Economics is not.

What Economics is not: by Abdi Ali Jama.

Most of the people think about economists as being stringent, miser or even mean; by contrast  economists are noble; for they understand much better than any body else what poverty is; therefore very much  concerned and sympathetic to poor people. Some others may say erroneously that economics is about wealth maximizing and money making.  With this small piece I intend to disabuse of that perceptions.

First of all, personal qualities such as generosity, courage, honesty and their opposites are, in my view, things that we genetically inherit from our parents and ancestors given the environmental factors. For example if someone who is coward by nature is given military training course, would that make him bold or brave? Similarly, economics course would not turn someone who is born generous to miser given the fact that Economics is not about being miser or mean in the first place. Some people may even get flabbergasted or astonished if I say Economics often spurs spending rather than saving.

 Secondly, the word Economics is originally from Greek word which means management of household.  Economics is about management of scarce resources for competing society needs or ends.  We as human have unlimited needs.  We need goods and services to address and satisfy those needs. However, resources required to produce those products are relatively scarce. Hence, there is obviously an economic problem (scarcity) that results from unlimited needs against limited resources. Therefore, we need to prioritize our needs by allocating our resources as efficiently as possible. The question is how?. The answer is by making decisions in regard to hard choices we face everyday from individual, family, national to international levels.

Had things been the opposite,  we would have been  able to satiate all our needs by giving every one of us every thing he or she needs ; and that would only have been possible if we had have produced as many different goods and services as we desire!!. We wish we had lived in such a world; paradise perhaps; where there is no scarcity and therefore no economic problem.

Thirdly, Economics is learning about human behavior like any other social sciences; tshe subject matter being economic behavior of human being in his ordinary life as individual and household level as well as national and international arena; this would help us set economic policies that would guide human behavior to achieve specific economic goals and objectives.

Lastly but not least, some people may think that economic issues are not so complicated that we might not need to study it as a separate discipline; however, as any knowledgeable person can understand, things are more obscure and paradoxical than we perceive by our mere intuition.

 By: Abdi Ali Jama

Abdirrahman99@hotmail.com