ترجمه متون اقتصادی متن اول

Economics

Economics is the science of production, exchange, and consumption in economic systems. It shows how scarce resources can be used to increase human wealth and welfare.           

Its central focus is on scarcity and choice. Scarcity is the fundamental economic condition of human life. The resources available to produce goods are limited, so that the goods themselves are scarce. Economic scarcity requires people to make economic choices, and economics is about comparing alternatives and choosing among them.

The need for choices is evident at all levels of life, from personal affairs to matters of worldwide urgency. On personal level, one might like to have excellent food and clothes, spacious living quarters furnished in style, frequent travel and so on. Yet because their incomes will provide only modest amounts of these goods, most people must always choose among them. For example, the price of a new coat may equal 50 gallons of gasoline, a weekend trip home, 10 restaurant meals, or a 2 degrees warmer room temperature all winter. Each purchase may foreclose buying the others. Such decisions are made routinely by everyone because scarcity requires an endless series of choices.

Companies are also forced by scarcity to make careful choices among alternatives as they convert inputs into outputs.  Both a local baker and the huge General Motors Corporation, for example, must decide each day and week how many workers and other inputs to employ, and then use them efficiently in producing bread and automobiles.

At the national level, there are also important economic choices to be made. For example, an increase in the nation's military forces and weaponry might make the country more secure from attack. But the added military spending might have to be obtained by cutting back on programs to inoculate children against disease and to provide medical care to the aged. Better roads may entail worse libraries; more funds for health care may mean less for education. Even more broadly, actions to reduce price inflation may cause national output to fall and unemployment to rise.

To all such small and large choices, economists apply economic analysis, a system of concepts and logical hypotheses that has been developed over more than two centuries in debates among generations of economists. The debates continue, and economics itself is still changing.