[Rifleman]

Electrical Engineering degree. I read _Human Action_ (honest, cover to cover) just after graduating. Also, _Socialism_. His ideas had a HUGE effect on me.

I think that one of Mises most interesting insights is that, a socialist system, to replace the calculations that the market provides would need to create a system of partial differential equations that by their nature are not, in general, solvable (being nonlinear and all) and far to big to calculate via numerical methods. Modern computers might have solved that, but it turns out that you can't calculate solutions anyway because the model will be, like weather models, sensitive to initial conditions and will diverge from reality too quickly to be of any use.

Without this calculation, a planned system will ALWAYS be enormously less efficient than a market system. So socialism isn't just wrong and oppressive, but a guarenteed failure as well.

[logician2u]

That's an unusual background for the study of economics, but not all that surprising. Lots of people with technical degrees are finding that their education lends itself well to learning econ, especially in the Austrian school.

Just a hunch, but I suspect it goes down a lot easier not having been exposed to Samuelson, Keynes, et al as undergraduates. As Torie's example illustrates, knowing too much about what passes for economics can be a detriment to further learning. Dismal science burnout, maybe?