My major in college was economics. I came to that decision by going through the entire bulletin and eliminating every other major. It was actually a good result, even though my process was crap. I didn’t actually know what economics was about, and I didn’t actually know what all the other majors I eliminated were actually about.
Most people think that economics is about the economy, about money and finance and business and companies.
But economics is actually about making decisions, which is actually one of the most interesting topics to think about.
Most people use economics to think, “How can I make a decision?”
There’s a relatively new branch of economics called behavioral economics, studying how people, well, behave. It turns out people have cognitive biases which cloud their judgement. Charlie Munger gave a great speech on this topic. In economics, there’s also a concept called the Principal-Agent problem, where letting other people make decisions for you is a bad idea.
What I don’t get, is if you understand that other people will probably not make good decisions for you, plus you understand that we all have biases that we don’t realize and have no control over, why wouldn’t you minimize how much say any other person has over you?