Given your econ major, surely there must be some interesting problems you have come across that you would like to attack by writing some programs?
Python is a great language to dive into. Easy to learn because it intentionally left out most of the boiler-plate fluff from other languages and lets you just express your solution in a direct, concise fashion.
If you get to the point where you need to crunch large number sets, check out scipy and numpy (just google). Takes a slight effort to set up initially, but then allows you to quickly process lots of numbers. Linear algebra, optimization, etc.
Python is a great language to dive into. Easy to learn because it intentionally left out most of the boiler-plate fluff from other languages and lets you just express your solution in a direct, concise fashion.
If you get to the point where you need to crunch large number sets, check out scipy and numpy (just google). Takes a slight effort to set up initially, but then allows you to quickly process lots of numbers. Linear algebra, optimization, etc.