Answers (1)
Economics comes from the Greek word oikonomia, which means a household. The English word means management, as in the class called "Home Economics". Since management always comes down to pinching pennies, the word comes to mean frugality.
Did you buy something today? Let's pretend you bought a pencil: which one? Did you look for a certain brand or grade or color, or did you just grab whatever was nearest the checkout line? Whatever you did, you cast a vote for that exact presentation of the product. For example, pencils are yellow just because people like that color.
All such decisions in an area, measured in local currency for convenience, make up what we call the economy of that area. But we need to remember that the economy is the total of buying decisions, not the total of money going around. For example, the USA had a program recently in which people were given cash to buy new cars, but they had to crush their old cars. The politicians assumed that this would stimulate the American economy. Imagine the surprise when it was discovered that almost all that money had gone to car makers outside the country, because there are not many American car makers left. In addition to that insult, prices of used car parts soared because of the restricted supply. The actual effect on the actual economy was exactly the opposite of what politicians thought it would be.
That is called "broken window fallacy": the supposition that breaking a window enriches the economy by the cost of its replacement. You can find an article in wikipedia with that title.