Everyday Economics

I know you're in there
You're just of sight
Oh, time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight
--Al Stewart

Mises notes that many folks mistakenly view economics as concerned only with monetary outcomes and material well being--applicable toward capatalistic systems but not other forms of organized society. This narrow view assumes that, because capitalists are obsessed with wealth, cost, and profit, economics only 'matters' in this context.

As Mises observes, however, cost is an element of any kind of human action. Cost is the value of things individuals give up in order to attain what is desired. It is the value attached to the most urgently desired satisfaction among other satisfactions that must be foregone. Choosing to spend time with family rather than to work on the yard, for example, is an economic decision because it requires a sacrifice--one or the other. Whenever conditions of scarcity exist, then choices must be 'economized.'

Income gained from economic decisions can be psychic as well as material in nature.

Indeed, time may be the ultimate economic good. As humans, each of us has a limited amount of it. And how we spend this exact minute is important because we can never get that minute back. Time, like any scarce good, requires economizing.

Economics, then, can be viewed more generally as the study of decisions that require sacrifice. The domain of such decisions blankets the human condition.