what, then, is economics?

today, i feel like straying away from the unqualified analyses of us economic policy that i've been prone to slip into. i'd rather stray into the wild border country of philosophy, a place where economics is ever more reluctant to go. i'll start with a question, one for which i can't, for the life of me, find an a satisfying answer.

what is economics?

or, rephrased more specifically

what is the study of economics for?

any of the most-read tomes which are dedicated to introducing the (heavily circumscribed) subject will answer as such: economics is concerned with the allocation of scarce resources. sometimes 'resources' will be replaced with the somewhat less ambiguous 'goods and services'. it doesn't take too much insight to notice immediately that this not a very satisfying statement, and is, moreover, a loaded one. is economics a science of distribution restricted to a range of material objects? if so, it doesn't behave very much like what we would expect of just such a science. what scale are we to assume? at the macro level, most economists defer to the satisfaction of pareto optimality as the only distributory condition worth meeting. so is it the micro level, then, that we are to worry about allocation--that is, how the individual chooses to allocate, to themselves, their choice of goods and services? if that is the case, what power would an aggreggative science have at all? wouldn't economics simply become a subset of psychology, able, in some instances, to deliver behavioral insights, but ultimately restricted to the micro-scale and therefore the idiosyncrasies of individual human beings?

i ask because i'm aware of a very prominent inadequacy which complicates my interest in economics. i really don't know what i'm supposed to be studying. on the one hand, there are vast pools of data, data that corresponds to innumerable sectors of human activity. there is data on stock markets, data on credit markets, data on income percentiles, data on income distribution; part-time and full-time labor markets and on income-streams by age cohort; unpaid domestic and volunteer labor vs. wage-labor markets. there is data, and there is a statistical science, econometrics, that is devoted to studying it. there are also models, endless numbers of models, models which visualize abstractions from these data sets and offer, therefore, potential insight into the correlation and directionality between certain variables. and then there is economic philosophy, the concern of which is the values that guide all of these numbers and which may, if aligned to so-and-so's satisfaction, deliver socially optimal results.

in the end, however, i can't find the walls that clearly delineates all of these things from anything else. the easy route would be to point at anything with an explicit dollar price and claim that it was my job to pour over it. unfortunately, the existence of 'negative externalities' prevents me from honestly believing that that is true. i can't help but agree with marx, that ultimately, all social structures emerge from economic arrangements, but i can't follow marx as far as pretending that these new mechanisms and the behavioral patterns that they enforce do not, in turn, affect those economic systems. maybe the early united states, founded, as it was, by independent farmers and merchants, adopted a weak federal system because of the difficulties posed by reigning in any further those powerful men; but what was the new deal if not the use of that federal system to change these economic circumstances?

i'm going to head off what i expect will be the immediate response to this post, which is to defend the usefulness of economics. i'm not doubting nor debating that. i'm only trying to understand at what point one can reasonably draw the line, a point at which the enormity of human action and its multiple contigencies is recognized, but where also measurement and therefore inference is still possible. i can't think of a pithy statement to sum up what i want. maybe someone else can?

p.s. i don't got no reason to use capitals. i tried it, i didn't like it, i ain't goin back, capisc'?