This document introduces economics as the social science dealing with scarcity and how individuals and societies make choices to allocate scarce resources. It defines scarcity, both relative and absolute, and discusses the basic economic resources of land, labor, and capital. The document also outlines the two main branches of economics - macroeconomics focused on overall economic performance and microeconomics focused on individual entities. It concludes by explaining the basic economic problems societies face and why economics is an important subject to understand rational decision making.