What is Economics?

I defined economics at the end of class on Tuesday as the science of the social provisioning process.We will devote much of the next few weeks to exploring this issue in more detail. The important thing to keep in mind as we go forward in the class is that economic systems, regardless of whether we are dealing with capitalism, feudalism, something based upon slavery, or egalitarian tribal societies, each have these features in common:

1. a system for producing all of the goods and services that we need to carry out our lives.
2. a system for distributing these produced goods
3. some set of institutions that allow the system to reproduce itself. 

For most of the course (once we get through some historical material) we will be concerned with the economic problem under capitalism. That is, what moves us to produce the goods and services in a monetary production economy?