I am not a professional economist. Nor have I played one on TV. My own academic background is in literature, philosophy, and then theology, where I earned my doctorate writing about soon-to-be-saint John Henry Newman and the threat of Hell. My knowledge of economics has come out of interest and necessity. My interest is because my own liberal education, no matter how flawed it may have been or dilatory I was in study, convinced me that all knowledge is one, and that to truly have a view of the world, one must have a sense of the importance and place of all subjects. Though economists have often overstated the importance of their discipline, I have nevertheless been impressed with the ways in which economists, though often dismissed with Macaulay’s gibe about being a “dismal science,” have often come, as William McGurn has observed, to the same practical conclusions about freedom and human dignity that theologians and moral philosophers have.

The necessity in my interest in economics is because I am married and have seven children. Though the sums needed to raise them are often overstated, my experience is that they do cost money. “Economy” comes from two Greek words, oikos (home) and nomos (rule). While many of us tend to think of economics as involving titans of industry, IPOs, international deals, and world-scale decisions and players, economics in its original sense is all home economics.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/08/writing-economics-david-deavel.html