What purpose can economics—and economists—serve? The answer seems simple: to advise decision-makers on how to satisfy needs as fully as possible over a given period and within a given area. This opens up a vast field of investigation. Two main approaches have been adopted to organize it.
The first takes the behavior of representative economic agents as its starting point and derives the conditions required to achieve an optimal outcome: this is microeconomics.
The second starts from economic functions (production, income distribution, consumption, saving and investment), seeking to understand how they interlock and then derive the conditions under which an optimum, such as full employment, can be achieved: this is macroeconomics.
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Unlike the "hard" sciences: a multiplicity of "paradigms"
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