I think it's a valuable thing to study.

I think taking just micro and macro is generally bad for people. A little bit of economics gives people a simple framework upon which to hang their bias and a whole lot more unmerited confidence in that bias.

If you go a little deeper you can't avoid the fact that almost any policy position will have winners and losers. Most people can only see the benefits of the policy choice that leans toward their bias and refuse to acknowledge that it could have any downside.

I helps you really understand opportunity costs. Cost Benefit Analysis was one of the best classes I took. People bag on it as a discipline soooo fucking hard and it's often used for evil but if it's done rigorously and ethically it really can lead to better outcomes.

The psychology of economic decisions is pretty interesting. Peoples fear of loosing something being so much more powerful than their desire to gain something. The way hot button issues distort our valuation of policy choices. Stuff like spending on health vs spending on terrorism.

Game theory makes you look at the world a bit differently.

If you study the history of economics and still believe that this is the best system that could ever be you're an idiot.

I have to imagine that it enriches my understanding of the world more than any hard science would have. Biology and Physics may be interesting but I don't know that undergraduate study in either would brush up against the world as consistently as economics. Maybe philosophy or literature could be enlightening on the same level but I rarely found academic analysis of books anything but tiresome and philosophy generally pissed me off.

He picked a poor analogy with medicine. Psychology would have been a much better comparison, or even neuroscience. In these disciplines there are things that we can talk about with a great deal of confidence

Here is the kind of thing that an extremely rigorous professor concluded a semester of study about international trade with "We can say, with a high degree of confidence, that international trade increases GDP by at least 1/2 of a percent". She was a true believer in the value of free trade and markets, Had some reservations about FDI that were way above my head. That's a semester of theory about why trade was good and when it came down to econometric truth she could confidently tease out a measly half a percent if she was only going to accept the most rigorous and ethical analysis. I found the rigor impressive even if the power of economics to foretell the future or confidently tell us anything useful about our world a little bit less than what the general public thinks it can do.