You can talk about money without every having to make any. Mick Jagger and Arnold Schwarzenegger both studied economics and look how they turned out. When you are in the unemployment line, at least you will know why you are there. Although ethics teaches that virtue is its own reward, in economics we get taught that reward is its own virtue. When you get drunk, you can tell everyone that you are just researching the law of diminishing marginal utility.
Econometricians do it if they can identify it.
Applied econometricians do it even if they can't. Economists do it with Slutsky matrices. Economists do it discretely AND continuously. Economists do it on Leontief's table. Heard at the Bocconi university in Milan.