<p>I warned you…</p>
<p>You’re right that it’s hard to judge what a major in a subject would be like when you’ve only had a semester in it. Let me try and give you a sense of the discipline so you have an idea of what you’d be getting yourself into. But keep in mind the caveat that this is only the interpretation of one (finals-addled) person.</p>
<p>Economics is basically the study of idealized representations of human behavior and institutions. We call these representations “models”. While they are often grossly oversimplified, they are useful tools for helping you to wrap your mind around how the world works. A good model cuts out less relevant detail and focuses you on the most important characteristics of the situation. You can then use it to analyze and make reasonably good predictions about how things will function in the real world.</p>
<p>The most commonly used economic model is the rational actor model of human behavior, which is sort of a caricature of real people. This caricature has an explicit mathematical function which quantifies its happiness (“utility”), cares nothing about anything except its own utility, and seeks to maximize it using pure rationality. As you may have noticed, real people are very much unlike this. Real people don’t have explicit formulas for their happiness, don’t scrupulously calculate how various courses of action will affect that formula, and do care about things other than their own happiness. However, it turns out that this caricature, because it is so simplified, is a useful tool for analyzing the behavior of real people. People’s real-world behavior often closely matches what the caricature would do. For example, the rational actor caricature will respond to an increase in the price of gas by driving less. As you probably noticed when gas prices spiked a while back, so do you.</p>
<p>An additional benefit is that the model is flexible enough that it can be modified when it turns out that it is systematically missing something about real behavior. For example, real people turn out to care not only about their own well-being, but also about the well-being of their children. This is for a lot of complex moral, social, and biological reasons, but it turns out that if you simply add a term that corresponds to the child’s happiness in your rational actor’s utility function, your new caricature behaves very much like a real person.</p>
<p>The result is that you have a very flexible and robust set of tools for analyzing pretty much anything. This includes traditionally economic subjects like how people respond to changes in prices or what effects the employment rate, and these sorts of questions are what economics spends most of its time on. But it also includes things like what determines whether someone will commit a crime, what affects how often people marry and divorce, and how often football teams should go for it on 4th down. For example, an Amherst professor just published a paper on the practice of [url=<a href=“https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/who_knows/node/189251]dueling[/url”>https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/who_knows/node/189251]dueling[/url</a>].</p>
<p>On the off chance that my wall of text didn’t scare you off, here’s some more practical advice. You are right that econ can get a little math intensive, but not in the way you might be thinking. That math itself is fairly straightforward - mostly algebra, with some occasional calculus - and there aren’t all that many formulas to learn. The big thing is that econ requires a good intuitive sense of the math. You want to be able to look at an equation and really understand what it means and how it would be affected if something about the situation were to change. Being able to do complicated integrals in you head is nice, but nowhere close to necessary.</p>
<p>The second, and probably more important, thing about doing econ is that you have to be comfortable with making abstractions that don’t exactly match reality. Real people are very different from rational utility-maximizers, and sometimes economists talk about them like they are the same thing. Sometimes those differences are relevant, but when they’re not, you have to be able to push them to one side.</p>