Are Economic Issues the same as Social Issues?

[fendarplaya]

Are Economic Issues the same as Social Issues? If not then what is the primary difference? It kinda sounds like economic issues can be grouped with social issues like the stock market crashing, unemployment, etc...

[AreJay]

Everything is an economic question at some level - people seek to maximize utility in every situation given their budget constraints which can be time, social skills, or good looks or anything not just money. At the same time it is easier to understand some phenomena though other lenses than the economic lens that underlies it. For example, if you decide to get married you get a benefit and bear a cost which can be understood with microeconomic analysis. Trying to understand things like marriage rates and divorce rates could be done with economic analysis but there are usually too many variables to get any meaningful understanding and sociology is a better tool since things like attitude to marriage and divorce are usually the most important variables anyway.

SO while social issues and economic issues are tied they can be viewed as different. Unemployment and income disparity and political economy certainly directly overlap in easy to identify ways but using economics to understand social deviance and the developments of sub cultures is daunting and likely to not lead to as good of an understanding as the broad an less rigid diciple of sociology. It is like in the hard sciences. Physics can be used to describe chemistry (or chemistry to describe biology) but a better understanding can be gained by using chemistry type analysis when dealing with areas that fall under chemistry.