ABSTRACT
Economics is the study of how people manage their resources to meet their needs and enhance their well-being. Individuals and societies engage in four essential economic activities: resource management, production, distribution, and consumption. Economic conditions at the aggregate level create the environment in which individual economic actors make their decisions. These conditions include rates of unemployment and inflation, ecological limits and constraints, degrees of economic inequality, and social/cultural assumptions about trust and responsibility. Macroeconomics seeks to explain an especially interesting phenomenon: the fact that bad things can often happen on a national or global level even though virtually no individual or microeconomic-level organization wants or intends them to happen. People also speak of the global economy, meaning the system of economic rules, norms, and interactions by which economic actors and actions in different parts of the world are connected to one another.
