Economics

**Economics** is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. It is a social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth. As academic disciplines go, it is quite young: the first major book of Economics was not published until 1776 -- it was Adam Smith's *The Wealth of Nations*.

There is an economic aspect to almost any topic one can think of - Education, Religion, Politics, Employment, Transport, Defense, etc.

The most primitive hunter-gatherer band has an economy but, because the discipline begins with the study of trading societies, its most detailed and precise work has dealt with the institutions belonging to them. Modern economics tends to discuss earlier forms of social organization chiefly in terms of their transition to societies based on the exchange of commodities.

One of the guiding ideas in Economics is scarcity. Almost everything is scarce; there are too few resources to satisfy all of humanity. It's not only the poor who feel deprived; even those better well-off seem to want more. It is the economist's job to evaluate the choices that exist for the use of those resources.

A more modern aspect of Economics is the concept of incentives, which guide the choices made by economic agents.

TEN RICHEST COUNTRIES

You are out of date. There are later statistics than for 1998. Such statistics are only very very rough approximations of reality. A person in Russia may live on $2000 a year, but their apartment may cost them $4 a month. A person in Japan may make $100,000 a year, but a Big Mac may cost $12. At one time, the gross national product of Sweden was the same as that of China. Now, I don't doubt that Sweden was more prosperous than China, but a Swede was never 1,000 times as rich as a Chinese.

Maybe they were in terms of income, but income doesn't take different price levels into account.

Here would be my estimate for the nations with the highest GNP per capita.

1. United States

2. Norway

3. Singapore

4. Germany

5. Britain

6. Canada

7. Belgium

8. Netherlands

9. France

10.Italy

Here are my estimates for total GNP

1. United States

2. Japan

3. China

4. Germany

5. India

6. France

7. Italy

8. Britain

9. Brazil

10. Russia

Now, let's check the 2002 Time Almanac

Page 714 UN Most Livable Countries 2001

1. Norway

2. Australia

3. Canada

4. Sweden

5. Belgium

6. United States

7. Iceland

8. Netherlands

9. Japan

10. Finland

Page 706 Highest Life Expectancy

1. Andorra 83.47

2. San Marino 81.23

3. Japan 80.80

4. Singapore 80.17

5. Australia 79.87

6. Switzerland 79.73

7. Sweden 79.71

8. Canada 79.56

9. Ireland 79.52

10. Italy 79.14

Page 711 Personal Computers per 1,000 persons

1. United States 511

2. Australia 471

3. Canada 361

4. Finland 360

5. United Kingdom 306

6. Germany 297

7. Japan 287

8. Israel 246

9. France 221

10. Italy 192

Pages 716-717 GNP

1. United States 9.255 trillion dollars

2. China 4.8 trillion

3. Japan 2.95 trillion

4. Germany 1.864 trillion

5. India 1.805 trillion

6. France 1.373 trillion

7. UK 1.29 trillion

8. Italy 1.212 trillion

9. Brazil 1.057 trillion

10. Mexico 865.5 billion

Pages 716-717 GNP per capita

1. Luxembourg 34,200 dollars

2. United States 33,900

3. Singapore 27,800

4. Switzerland 27,100

5. Monaco 27,000

6. Norway 25,100

7. Belgium 23,900

8. Denmark 23,800

9. Iceland 23,500

10. Austria 23,400

Now, let's add up the scores. A number one place is 10 points, a number two place 9 points, and so on.

Total Points

1. United States 34 points

2. Australia 24

3. Japan 22

4. Canada 19

5. Norway 15

6. Singapore 15

7. Germany 12

8. Switzerland 12

9. Sweden 11

10. UK 10

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  To summarize, northwestern European countries and countries built by their descendants are on top, with a couple of Asian rim countries doing well too. The United States is way out in front of all others. That's my country!

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 During the time of the British Empire, Britain was usually about the richest per capita nation in Europe.

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You can thank Tony Blair and his leftist friends for dragging Britain down and down.

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The traditional major divisions of Economics include Microeconomics, which deals with the behaviour of individual consumers, companies, traders, and farmers; and Macroeconomics, which focuses on aggregates such as the level of income in an economy, the volume of total employment, and the flow of investment. Another branch, Development Economics, investigates the history and changes of economic activity and organization over a period of time, as well as their relation to other activities and institutions. Within these three major divisions there are specialized areas of study that try to answer questions on a broad spectrum of human economic activity, including public finance, money supply and banking, international trade, labor, industrial organization, and Agriculture. The areas of investigation in Economics overlap with other social sciences like Political Science, but Economics focuses on relations between buyer and seller or within markets for those actors.

History of Economics

-- Microeconomics -- Macroeconomics -- Development Economics -- Recession -- inflation -- Market forms -- Keynesian economics -- Austrian School -- Finance -- factors of production -- economics of information

capitalism -- communism

Economists -- Nobel prize in economic sciences

What are our priorities for writing in this area? To help develop a list of the most basic topics in Economics, please see Economics basic topics.

/Talk