ABSTRACT
Because economics has to do with the wealth-getting and wealth-using activities of men, it is often defined as “the science of wealth”. This is not a wholly satisfactory definition, for the special characteristics of economics are determined not so much by its subject matter as by the particular interests which have prompted the enquiries of economists and the particular questions which they have tried to answer. We define economics better, therefore, when we say that it is a science which is concerned with the communal problems of economic life. The ordering of the economic affairs of the household and the planning and management of business undertakings come alike under its purview, but its interests and problems are not the interests and problems of either household economy or business enterprise. How men acquire wealth and how they use it are matters of fundamental importance for economics, but its principal concern is with the intricate interrelations of various wealth-getting and wealth-using activities and with the ways in which these activities affect the welfare of the community. The attention which economics gives to the general or social aspects of the interplay of economic activities is born of its central interest in the wisdom or unwisdom of measures which governments take or which conceivably they might take with a view to regulating, controlling or participating in them or to directing them into one channel rather than another. The older name, “political economy”, still gives a right impression of the kinds of problems with which economics is mostly concerned.
