Implications
The following are the implications of this definition:
- Economics is a study of mankind.
- Human life has several aspects: social, religious, economic and political—but economics is concerned only with the economic aspect of life.
- Promotion of welfare is the ultimate goal, but the term welfare is used in a narrow sense to meet material welfare only.
According to Edwin Cannan, "the aim of political economy or Economics is the explanation of the general causes on which the material welfare of human beings depend".
Marshall clearly explains that economic activity is different from other activity. For example,
- If a student visits a friend who is ill, it is a social activity,
- If a person give his vote in an election, it is a political activity.
- If a person goes to church/temple it is a religious activity.
Marshall defines economic activity as separate from the above activities. A farmer who toils in the field, or a worker on an assembly, are performing an economic activity: they work to increase their material welfare (primarily by earning money). Money buys goods or services that satisfy wants. In other words, economics deals with effort, wants, and the satisfaction of those wants.
Read more about this topic: Welfare Definition Of Economics
Famous quotes containing the word implications:
“When it had long since outgrown his purely medical implications and become a world movement which penetrated into every field of science and every domain of the intellect: literature, the history of art, religion and prehistory; mythology, folklore, pedagogy, and what not.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
—Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985)
“The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)