@LukeAlmighty if you learn economics you'll be able to see civilizational self-harm on a massive scale. You see people turning away from the "humanity if ..." futurescape meme everywhere you look.

And, economics is only not *entirely* beyond human comprehension. There are people that can understand it. Even if you don't have 200 IQ, you can - if you are merely a genius - study an economic treatise written by someone like that, and get a working understanding of economics. But for most people it's completely unreachable territory. Despite the quality of everyone's lives depending on good economic decisions.

And, economics is not *merely* only comprehensible by the few, but it's also enormously corrupt as a profession. From the very first
>Catherine the Great: so what would my role be?
>Economist: you wouldn't have one!
people who learned enough economics to be persuasive to people who know no economics, have decided that USAID grants come easier if you lie a bit about it.

The only non-Lovecraftian thing about economics is that there's no horrifying realization at the end of it. There aren't "useless eaters" or ancient enemy neanderthals or stellar cataclysms or 24 years of covert nuclear terrorism. In economics the self-harm is active and can be stopped at any time, and incremental improvements are so immediately beneficial that you won't even care that you've been driving in the wrong direction for the past 400 miles. Large-scale economic shenanigans like the Federal Reserve you can comfortably talk about in mixed company even if the other parties to the discussion don't get it or strongly disagree with you.

Although, this probably mostly comes from the first point: that economics is almost entirely beyond human comprehension. If the masses could really ever get how much the Federal Reserve has fucked the country, it'd be very dangerous to talk about it, and even the victims would react emotionally against such talk because it'd come with an uncomfortable burden to act.