Adam Smith by Patric Parc Many people have asked this, many times, myself included. Multiple reasons present themselves along my study journey, one more solid than another. I owe my discovery to experience, but also to wise men and women who offered their thoughts.
Several years later now, I am going into my third year in economics. Today, my responses to this question will be:
1. IT IS EXCEEDINGLY RELEVANT The more you look around, the more you see that economics underpins every human action. It can be applied to earthly pursuit like business, or ideology studies such as an understanding of the human race. Just as a mathematician can imagine the whole universe to be a subspace, and everything a vector, economics takes shape in every earthly, humanly occurrences. This may not extend to other mechanics like celestial movements or gravity, and I am sure that chemical balances do not correspond to the law of supply and demand, but being able to discover and explain patterns in what governs the society offers endless excitement.
Economics is not a product of the earth but one of politics, psychology, anthropology, culture, and mathematics. Economics is created and further complicated by humans. It is entirely human, and it is fun to study us.
2. IT IS BOTH A SCIENCE AND AN ART Economics trains one to feel, to understand, and to reason. Students of economics learn classic thoughts and apply them in today’s cases; use numbers to represent a complex social relationship or to theorize a likely decision, and use intuition to pick out variables in a model. Economics is an art, but we conduct strict scientific experiments despite knowing that some human variable cannot (yet) be accounted for. It is a science – an awkward one – as we analyse and predict knowing that a high accuracy is about as likely as hitting jackpot twice in a row, both with tickets bought on a rainy afternoon. We learn to make confident claims with that prediction anyway, because funnily enough, the market reacts to prediction – outcome depends on prediction.
It is 2018, and I have chosen to specialize in the field with my honours economics program. I am learning quite a lot on the side: reflections and skills that join to make theoretical learnings come alive. Never has economics captured and excited me quite like this, and never have I been able to see how crucial this field is as the world moves into uncharted territory.
Feature Image is Adam Smith by Patric Parc from Wikimedia Commons
Written by Natasha. Last edited:2018-06-19 09:12:34