What is economics and what do economists do?

In this short introduction to the discipline of economics, Dr. Pete Schuhmann presents a basic overview of the fundamental issues of interest to economists and how they study those issues. He defines economics as the study of how people deal with scarcity and distribute scarce resources. He highlights the two broad branches of economics, macro and micro, and explains that macroeconomics focuses on the study of the entire economy at the national and international scales, while microeconomics looks at individual and firm-level decision-making and dynamics. He notes that economists use key concepts like opportunity cost to understand trade-offs and decision-making, and that questions of interest for economists arise by thinking at the margin. More information on the Immersion Program and other lectures can be found here: