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[quote=Anonymous]PP... A reading from the book "Liar's Poker" by Michael Lewis, 1989, P. 24.

"And the more people studied economics, the more an economics degree became a requirement for a job on Wall Street.

There was a good reason for this.  Economics satisfied the two most basic needs of investment bankers.  First investment bankers wanted practical people, willing to subordinate their educations to their careers.  Economics, which was becoming an ever more abstruse science, producing mathematical treatises with no obvious use, seemed almost designed as a sifting device.  The way it was taught did not exactly fire the imagination...[snip]...I often asked otherwise intelligent members of the prebanking set why they studied economics, and they explained that it was the most practical course of study, even while they spent  their time drawing funny little graphs.  They were right, of course, and that was even more maddening.  Economics WAS practical.  It got people jobs.  And it did this because it demonstrated that they were among the most fervent believers in the primacy of economic life.

Investment bankers also wanted to believe, like members of any exclusive club, that the logic to their recruiting techniques was airtight...No one who didn't belong was admitted...[snip]...The only inexplicable aspect of the process was that economic theory (which is, after all, what economics students were supposed to know) served almost no function in an investment bank.  The bankers used economics as a sort of standardized test of generalized intelligence."

This passage amused me so much that, as an Econ major from the 80s, this is one of the few books I've kept for 30 years.  It's still basically the same phenomena out there.  Humanities grads need resume work experience in order to better convey what they can do for an employer.  We're basically talking about signalling.  Help your kid to send the right signals to a receptive hiring manager or firm and the major won't matter.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)#:~:text=Signalling%20started%20with%20the%20idea,information%20to%20the%20other%20party.

Good luck to your kid![/quote]

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