Economics was the most common major of the 100 wealthiest billionaires, Match College recently found, with Harvard the most common undergraduate college. Their study, based on the Forbes World Billionaires list combined with research on their academic backgrounds, should be read in light of two important caveats that economics majors will (hopefully) have learned. But there’s no doubt that economics provides helpful insights for those on their way to earning a billion dollars.
The first caveat is that correlation does not mean causation. Did the economics major enable these people to become billionaires? Or did the people with the ambition to become billionaires choose the major because it seemed most likely to help them? Perhaps they would have succeeded whatever their major, or maybe their success was a little due to their major.
Harvard was the most…