ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some mainstream economic concepts, including scarcity, opportunity cost, efficiency, cost benefit analysis, and how those concepts frame the choices faced by a society. It is primarily concerned with how mainstream economists and political economists study the choices a society makes to allocate its resources. The assumptions behind the Production possibilities curve (PPC) model include the following: there are only 2 relevant goods; any point on the PPC curve involves the full employment of available resources; resources are fixed; technology is fixed; and, any other factors that might affect the production of the 2 goods in question will remain unchanged. The political economists of various types find the mainstream analysis of scarcity and choice overly limiting, and extend the analysis into a number of areas, including ethics, culture, underemployment of resources, inequality, and gender empowerment. The mainstream economists, economics is about the difficult choices an individual, firm, or society must make when resources are scarce.
