Core to understanding the economy is recognizing that it is about human actions and interactions. In fact, the economy is people acting and interacting. We tend to think of the economy in terms of resources, machines, businesses, and perhaps jobs. But that simplification is misleading. Those are important, but they are all means to ends. The economy is about using means to attain ends. To put it differently, it is how we act to satisfy our wants, to make us better off. Simply put, the economy is about creating value. By choosing one thing over another, by acting, we rank things’ value to us—we economize. The economy is all of us economizing.