Economics

Right-wing politics is the range of political ideologies that view certain social orders and hierarchies as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically supporting this position in favour of conservatism, natural law, economics, authority, property, religion, or tradition. Hierarchy and inequality may be seen as natural results of traditional social differences or competition in market economies.

Right-wing politics are considered the counterpart to left-wing politics, and the left–right political spectrum is the most common political spectrum. The right includes social conservatives and fiscal conservatives, as well as right-libertarians. "Right" and "right-wing" have been variously used as compliments and pejoratives describing neoliberal, conservative, and fascist economic and social ideas.

The Brookings Institution, often stylized as Brookings, is an American think tank in Washington, D.C., United States.

The institution conducts research and education in the social sciences, primarily in economics (and tax policy), metropolitan policy, governance, foreign policy, global economy, and economic development.

The world economy or global economy is the economy of all humans in the world, referring to the global economic system, which includes all economic activities conducted both within and between nations, including production, consumption, economic management, work in general, financial transactions and trade of goods and services. In some contexts, the two terms are distinct: the "international" or "global economy" is measured separately and distinguished from national economies, while the "world economy" is simply an aggregate of the separate countries' measurements. Beyond the minimum standard concerning value in production, use and exchange, the definitions, representations, models and valuations of the world economy vary widely. It is inseparable from the geography and ecology of planet Earth.

It is common to limit questions of the world economy exclusively to human economic activity, and the world economy is typically judged in monetary terms, even in cases in which there is no efficient market to help valuate certain goods or services, or in cases in which a lack of independent research, genuine data or government cooperation makes calculating figures difficult. Typical examples are illegal drugs and other black market goods, which by any standard are a part of the world economy, but for which there is, by definition, no legal market of any kind.

A bellwether is a leader or an indicator of trends.

In politics, the term often applies in a metaphorical sense to characterize a geographic region where political tendencies match in microcosm those of a wider area, such that the result of an election in the former region might predict the eventual result in the latter. In economics, a 'bellwether' is a leading indicator of an economic trend.

Microeconomics is a branch of economics that studies the behavior of individuals and firms in making decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources and the interactions among these individuals and firms. Microeconomics focuses on the study of individual markets, sectors, or industries as opposed to the economy as a whole, which is studied in macroeconomics.

One goal of microeconomics is to analyze the market mechanisms that establish relative prices among goods and services and allocate limited resources among alternative uses. Microeconomics shows conditions under which free markets lead to desirable allocations. It also analyzes market failure, where markets fail to produce efficient results.

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is an umbrella term used to group together the related technical disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. It represents a broad and interconnected set of fields that are crucial for innovation and technological advancement. These disciplines are often grouped together because they share a common emphasis on critical thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills. The term is typically used in the context of education policy or curriculum choices in schools. It has implications for workforce development, national security concerns (as a shortage of STEM-educated citizens can reduce effectiveness in this area), and immigration policy, with regard to admitting foreign students and tech workers.

There is no universal agreement on which disciplines are included in STEM; in particular, whether or not the science in STEM includes social sciences, such as psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. In the United States, these are typically included by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Labor's O*Net online database for job seekers, and the Department of Homeland Security. In the United Kingdom, the social sciences are categorized separately and are instead grouped with humanities and arts to form another counterpart acronym HASS (humanities, arts, and social sciences), rebranded in 2020 as SHAPE (social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy). Some sources also use HEAL (health, education, administration, and literacy) as the counterpart of STEM.

In economics, a transaction cost is a cost incurred when making an economic trade when participating in a market.

The idea that transactions form the basis of economic thinking was introduced by the institutional economist John R. Commons in 1931. Oliver E. Williamson's Transaction Cost Economics article, published in 2008, popularized the concept of transaction costs. Douglass C. North argues that institutions, understood as the set of rules in a society, are key in the determination of transaction costs. In this sense, institutions that facilitate low transaction costs can boost economic growth.

In economics, utility is a measure of a certain person's satisfaction from a certain state of the world. Over time, the term has been used with at least two meanings.

• In a normative context, utility refers to a goal or objective that we wish to maximize, i.e., an objective function. This kind of utility bears a closer resemblance to the original utilitarian concept, developed by moral philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
• In a descriptive context, the term refers to an apparent objective function; such a function is revealed by a person's behavior, and specifically by their preferences over lotteries, which can be any quantified choice.

The relationship between these two kinds of utility functions has been a source of controversy among both economists and ethicists, with most maintaining that the two are distinct but generally related.

In economics, scarcity refers to the basic fact of life that there exists only a finite amount of human and nonhuman resources which the best technical knowledge is capable of using to produce only limited maximum amounts of each economic good. If the conditions of scarcity did not exist and an "infinite amount of every good could be produced or human wants fully satisfied ... there would be no economic goods, i.e. goods that are relatively scarce..." Scarcity is the limited availability of a commodity, which may be in demand in the market or by the commons. Scarcity also includes an individual's lack of resources to buy commodities. The opposite of scarcity is abundance. Scarcity plays a key role in economic theory, and it is essential for a "proper definition of economics itself".

British economist Lionel Robbins is famous for his definition of economics which uses scarcity: "Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." Economic theory views absolute and relative scarcity as distinct concepts and is "quick in emphasizing that it is relative scarcity that defines economics." Current economic theory is derived in large part from the concept of relative scarcity which "states that goods are scarce because there are not enough resources to produce all the goods that people want to consume".