>>376168
Okay, Anon, I'm home, here's the lowdown if you want to get "essential information":
it's all bullshit. To be quite honest, a lot of what people consider to be "essential" when it comes to knowledge and understanding of the world are just people blowing smoke up their own behind. Philosophy is perhaps one the biggest examples of this and part of the reason why people treat it like such a joke. The sad part is that it wasn't always like that. Before many of the education institutions that Christianity established during the Middle Ages, philosophy did justify it's exist as having to pull it's weight in covering religion, science, politics, and just about the study of any field that wasn't military tactics, husbandry, and the economic market.
But, that doesn't answer the question, now does? Since we're on the subject, to be quite honest, the closest material that exists when it comes to wanting to know about "philosophy" is unironic self-help people skill books. Mainly, the works by Dale Carnegie such as
How to Win Friends And Influence People and
How To Stop Worrying And Start Living. And, the reason why I point to him is that Carnegie's books are perhaps one of the best analyses and collections of philosophy that the world has provided. If nothing else, you should go through the books just to get a list of people and other works that have influenced much of the world's development to this era. However, if you want to see who influenced what, then just watch this doc that details how philosophy evolved throughout history:
https://yewtu.be/playlist?list=PLCD181CDF9DF652F7
For economics, you can find just about any textbook and it will do the work of explaining basic economics. If you want to know about application and the different markets and how they operate and how you can use them, then you're asking about something slightly different which is
business. Yes, for some reason, economics courses do not cover business knowledge because who the Hell knows why. But, there's also a very simple solution. And, that reading books about businesses. Do not take that to mean that your read material, such as all those meme books any idiot can pick up at Barnes & Noble that talk about how Netflix is going to take their business to the moon and beyond. That type of trash belongs in the same bin as so-called "Self help" material like
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. It's just there to take up space, and not worth spending your time on. Instead, spend read your time reading books by business people, or document how businesses have survived beyond 25-30 years. One go-to example I always refer to is Paul Getty's
How To Be Rich since it actually is a business owner explaining how the markets and business work. Another easy example is Trump's
The Art of the Deal, Warren Buffet's
The Essays Of Lessons For Corporate America, and Robert Kiyosaki's
Rich Dad Poor Dad series. In fact, I've recently acquired a copy of
Ford: The Men and the Machine so that I can read up on how the Ford motor company came to dominate the market and how it's been succeeding and failing ever since. A couple other books I plan on picking up later are
Half Luck and Half Brains: The Kemmons Wilson Holiday Inn Story and Eric Jackson's
The PayPal Wars. Also, there are works like Robert Evan's
The Kid Stays in the Picture that provides all the nitty-gritty details behind Hollywood and their business, and leaves people distraught over how the film industry really operates.
Moving onto politics it cannot be stressed enough that you just need to read history books. That is it, just read history. There's a saying that goes, "
History is politics and philosophy in action," and there's no better way to describe it. However, be aware that they are
TWO types of history that you're going to have to read: recorded history and traditional history. Recorded history is what "history" has been since the start of the 20th century, it's history that's based solely on facts and figures, and anything deemed somewhat "questionable" about it's validity is either scrutinized or ignored (Majority of the time). So, it can go without saying that just read as many history books as you'll can and you see how nothing has ever really changed. However, with this strictness to the understanding of history, it has also resulted in losing entire swaths of historical knowledge and understanding. To remedy this, however, you're going to pull up traditional history. These are works like Xenophon's, Livy's, and Strabo's records of the history. And, this history is also going to be going over the various myths and legends of the world like the classic Greek tragedies and Japan's
Kojiki. Perhaps the best compilation of the West's development of traditional history would have to be Charles Rollin's
The Ancient history, but there are probably loads of other books you can read as well.
Hope this helps getting you started.