Students who study economics acquire a general knowledge of the methods by which goods and services are allocated and incomes are generated and why prices, employment, money, and financial markets behave as they do.  

In economics courses students study how society distributes scarce resources and issues such as energy costs, inflation, interest rates, imports, and employment levels.

“If all men were equal in interest and endowment, natural or artificial, there would be no organized economic activity to explain.  Each man would be a Crusoe.  Economic theory thus explains why men cooperate through trade:  they do so because they are different.”  James Buchannan