Economics 101 in 10 Minutes

In this short introduction to economics, Dr. Pete Schuhmann answers the questions: What is economics? What do economists do? 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 level, 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. He also notes that, for economists, questions of interest arise when thinking at the margin.