The joke of economics is that it is a social science. If it is a social science it is a study of man, and man in society. If your model of man is so absurd and untrue that your "man" is abstracted beyond recognition, your subject has no claim to be a social science or a study of man. Economics is currently the study of economic man.
My advice is to read Smith (so that you can read) Marx. If you want some passable classical economics maybe Malthus and Turgot are interesting. George is a bt of a wildcard and P&P might be worth a read. Ignore Ricardo, Marshall, and Say at this point. Jump straight into Sraffa and Schumpeter. Read Mises and Hayek as meta-economists, then read Keynes, post-crash Fisher, Minsky, Keynes again and not an interpretation of Keynes. C. H. Douglas is interesting, he's wrong, but wrong in an interesting way. Avoid Friedman and please, please, please, please do not subscribe to the cultist and hack, Sephan MOlllyNeux.
Try to avoid economic spooks, that is, avoid "ought" statements. "There ought to be wealth equality/inequality", "there ought to be employment", "there ought to be growth", etc because if you begin to slide into politics you will become trapped in a conformation bias like stephy and the libertarians. The economics will justify the morality which in turn justifies the economics. You will remain an ideologue and a moron and will be all covered in ectoplasm.
>Varian
KEK yes, read this for a laff. In fact, OP, read the whole thing. You don't need to tear it apart because Varian's manifesto is so intellectually rotten, it will crumble to dust by simply reading it. Most Econ students will read a page or two of it's conclusions. They will ignore the omniscient dictator that sets all markets in equilibrium before trading. They will ignore that there is only one consumer in the entire economy, a consumer that can walk into a shop with 20 goods and, through completeness, rank ~1,500,000 bundles of goods.
Revel in the laughs when they take this micro-economic comedy and aggregate it into "Macroeconomics" (applied microeconomics), and the circus becomes even more surreal. They actually believe that reductionism implies constructionism. Even Physicists don't have the arrogance or stupidity to argue this.
Most "economics students" and professors are mathematically incompetent. They write "political economy" as a way to shield themselves. Are you a hack that cannot write philosophy? study politics or "political economy".
hacks hacks hacks hacks the lot of them. The real geniuses are sucked into worthwhile fields: Literature, Mathematics, Philosophy, etc and only the chaff remain.
Most econ majors are morons and don't actually know anything about economics. They come in for 3 years, learn falsehoods, and leave. They never probe the foundations of the subject, and professors will not teach students how these core principles are arrived at because it is "too complicated".