I saw the acceptance rate for the social sciences is 23% and Econ fell under that
You wouldn’t be admitted to the major, you would be admitted to pre-econ status. If you can’t meet the GPA requirements the first quarter for their statistics and intermediate economics courses you would be locked out of the major and unable to declare. I was told that only 65% of students admitted to Berkeley who apply to the major end up meeting the requirements to declare it.
As an econ major, 65% is very high compared to what you really see on campus.
There are a lot of non-econ admits that try to declare the econ major that are not incorporated into that statistic. When considering everyone in the prerequisite classes trying to get into the major, it seems more like 50-55%.
The bottleneck from the class size limits with the intermediate economics courses, combined with the capped major declare-in-your-first-semester transfer requirements, eliminates even more than that.
Econ is not a backdoor into Berkeley L&S and, IMHO, your far better off with Anthropology.
https://www.econ.berkeley.edu/undergrad/prospective/transfer-students indicates that transfer students intending to declare the economics major need to have at least a 3.0 GPA in previously taken prerequisite courses and a 2.7 GPA in prerequisite courses taken after transfer. The latter courses are one of Economics 100A, 100B, 101A, 101B, and a math or (usually) statistics course.
Students who wish to prepare for PhD study in economics should take the equivalent of Math 53 before transfer in order to be able to take Economics 101A (however, 101B only requires single variable calculus). Such students also tend to choose Economics 141 instead of 140 for econometrics; 141 requires both Math 53 and 54.