New Economics = New Math

The Economist waxes enthusiastic about how economics is helping firms at the ground level:

Economics is evolving, with a mission to solve firms’ real-life problems at its heart.

Divining hidden “types”—the buyer and the browsers, the content and the disgruntled—is a common challenge in the new realm of economics....new firms are often platforms on which buyers and sellers meet...Knowing more about a customer’s type can help the platform suggest a better link.

Facebook, Amazon, Google, LinkedIn, etc. have a detailed profile of their visitors that previous generations of market researchers could only dream of. The companies know many of visitors' personal attributes, including age, sex, location, employer, friends, family, and race. They know or can make shrewd guesses about wealth and income. The watchers know whether the visitors browse or buy, whether they comment or merely read, and whether they prefer to get their information from text or video.

The methodologies are not new, but what is revolutionary is the ability to sort oceans of data into dozens or more variables, and then associate the variables with certain behavioral outcomes.

To this observer the discipline is more statistics than economics, but we're quibbling about nomenclature.

If you have a solid knowledge of math, facility with tech tools, and the ability to put into perspective both the power and limitations of the new "big data" technology, the 21st century is your oyster.