Why I like Economics?

I recently turned in my Senior Economics Research Project. The end product ended up being a 40-page paper that I had created with months of hard work and countless sleepless nights. My paper looked at how a founder’s human capital factors, such as education, work experience, previous entrepreneurial experience, and previous industry experience, influences the fate of a new startup. It was a topic that I was/am very interested in, and the finding was quite insightful.

As I was finishing up the paper and typing up my final conclusion, I began to reflect on my past 4 years studying Economics. What has Economics taught me? What is the essence of this subject? How am I better, having studied Economics for the past 4 years? These are big questions and I don’t know if I have answers for them all, but I realized that if I had to do it all over again, I would still choose to study Economics.

To me, the beauty of Economics is that it is a field that attempts to understand impossibly complicated and dynamic processes by breaking them down into smaller components. Take my research for example, entrepreneurship is incredibly complicated. There are numerous variables that influence the outcome for an entrepreneur and these variables constantly interact with each other, often in numerous different ways. There may never be a way to completely explain or understand everything that goes into the process, but the field of Economics still tries. By breaking down a massively complicated process into smaller components and studying those smaller components, Economics tries to parse together insights to help us predict the outcomes of these complicated processes. It’s beautiful. It’s brave.

Humans are the most complicated but most fascinating. Unlike Psychology, which studies individuals, Economics studies the aggregate impact of human decisions. I truly believe that to be a good Economist you have to have empathy, you need to care about people, you need to think about why people do what they do. I have always been fascinated by people, but what studying Economics has given me is the ability to put intuition into logical steps that can be communicated. It has given me an ability to look at numeric results and be able to hypothesize on a story about why the results are the way they are. It instilled a belief that even if a perfect explanation isn’t attainable, it shouldn’t stop me from trying to understand something better.

I might never be able to draw a perfect circle by hand, but if I practice enough I can get pretty close.