According to a recent poll (all right ... according to my highly unscientific poll), 28.6% of you say ECK-onomic, 8.9% of you EEK-onomic, and the majority - 62.5% - use both pronunciations. Far be it from me to suggest that you're a bunch of wafflers, though!

I had hoped to discern some pattern in which of you chose specific pronunciations, but once again, I found none. Age, sex, nationality, tongue length - none of these seem to predict which you'll use. A couple of remaining possibilities, both raised in the comments on the poll:
1) Some people may choose a variant depending whether the definite article 'the' or indefinite article 'an' precedes it. However, that doesn't necessarily tell us much, because it's entirely possible that people would disagree as to which article goes with which pronunciation.
2) Some people may pronounce different 'econom-' words with different initial vowels (e.g. EE-conomy vs. ECK-onomical, etc.). Once again, though, there's no absolute rule that would explain why one variant would be chosen over another.
It seems to be just one of those words that varies in some pretty odd ways from person to person and situation to situation.

I first realized that I always use (or at least strongly prefer) ECK-onomics when, after hearing about the book Freakonomics for several months, it suddenly occurred to me that it wasn't just a portmanteau of 'freak' and 'onomics', but was actually a pun based on the rhyming 'EEK' and 'freak'. True story. Still a dumb title, though.

The eco of economic is the same as that in ecology. Both derive ultimately from Greek oikos 'house', through Latin, in which the root was spelled œco- (or oe, for the non-Unicode-enabled). œconomy goes back to the 16th century, but œcology only to 1873, and by the twentieth century the initial o had dropped off both words. There are hardly any words that retain an 'oe-' initial orthography: oenology (the study of wine) has mainly become enology, oestrogen has become estrogen (and in some dialects is even pronounced EE-strogen). Only oersted (a personal name adopted as a unit) has any chance of keeping it in the long term, I figure. But, in any case, I suspect that the presence of the initial œ tended to encourage an EEK pronunciation, but that with its loss it is moving towards ECK.

Finally, a bit of trivia: Apparently the venerable Oxford English Dictionary does not contain the word economics! While it has economy and economist (the definition of economist even includes the phrase 'A student of, or writer upon, economics or political economy"), it doesn't occur either as a headword or a sub-headword in any other entry. Bizarre.

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