Understanding What Economics Is

Economics is a social science. As Professor Paul A. Samuelson (1915-2009) rightly stated, economics is the oldest of the arts, the newest of the sciences, in fact, the queen of the social sciences. It is difficult to briefly define economics. Quoting, again. Professor Samuelson, the economics concept can be generalized through the following definition  

Economics is the study of how men and society end up choosing, with or without money, employment of productive resources (scarce) that may have different uses to produce various commodities and distribute them for consumption, present or future, between various individuals and groups that make up society, analyzing the costs or benefits of improving patterns of resource distribution. 

For the purposes of this book, we will be concerned with understanding and famifiarizing you with the concept of economics and focus on what is of interest to future process and bioprocesses engineers. The scheme presented below gives us the opportunity to understand all the interrelationships in the economy and identify what aspect we will focus on in this first year as novice prospective engineers. 

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