I haven't had a chance to read the whole thread yet, but I'd like to throw in my two cents.
1 cent: I'm reading a book called What the Best College Teachers Do. It's really quite an interesting book about teaching and what exactly is/should be taught. When you enter a discipline, you learn to think a certain way. You are supposed to be taught a new mental model for understanding the world. Economics, for example, teaches you about people interacting with other people through goods and services (and related stuff). Unfortunately, many teachers don't do a good job of causing you to think differently and think within that model. Many don't even recognize that it is a model of the world that they are giving you.
2 cent: I don't believe in being constrained to only one model of the world. That would make me too susceptible to Man-with-hammer syndrome ("To a man with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail"). So, I'm taking the time to learn about different disciplines (from philosophy and arts to the sciences to economics, to how to buy a car) because I believe that this multi-disciplinary education (that I'm giving myself) is improving my ability to win in the real world.
I would suggest doing something similar. Grab a whole bunch of beginners books (written easily, though, like the For Dummies books or The Complete Idiot's Guide to) and go through them and look for whatever grabs your interest. Recently I'm finding my interest being grabbed by Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Biology. Both of which offer very practical and useful information to me in understanding and interacting with the world and myself.
What I'm getting at is that your education isn't limited to what you learn in school. What you need to succeed in business, in life in general is not a man-with-hammer approach, but a more multi-disciplinary view. I also believe that success needs certain characteristics and personality traits (patience, persistance, ambition, hard-work, desire to grow and improve) more than it needs specific knowledge.
BTW, I don't think economics would help you to become a better businessperson beyond the basic concepts (opportunity cost, law of diminishing returns, etc) because economics tends to be so academic. Just my opinion.
HTH.
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