In this Sunday New York Times “Economic View” column, Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw advises that those who wish to pursue this “dismal science” take one or more courses in statistics while in college. He sees a dearth of knowledge on this subject in his first year students.
“High school mathematics curriculums spend too much time on traditional topics like Euclidean geometry and trigonometry. For a typical person, these are useful intellectual exercises but have little applicability to daily life. Students would be better served by learning more about probability and statistics.”
— N. Gregory Mankiw
I’m with him on learning more about stats but not at the expense of less geometry and trig, which come in very handy for anyone pursuing an engineering career. Also, budding economists could benefit from a little knowledge of period functions such as sine waves. It seems to me that what goes around comes around.