Bill Gates, the former Chairman of Microsoft and one of the richest men in the world is a voracious reader. Since his retirement, Gates has committed almost $30 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation which aids several ambitious healthcare and education programmes across the world. Bibliophile Bill even has a quote from Scott Fitzgerald’s book The Great Gatsby engraved on the dome above the library of his $100 million mansion. Bill Gates’ reading list has always generated a lot of curiosity. Many claim that the course of his philanthropy is steered the kind of books he happens to be reading that year. This month, Gates put up on his blog a list of best books he read in 2013 with a small, succinct note on why he liked them. Maybe you should put some of these on your reading list for 2014. Here’s what he thought of his 2013 selection:
The Box, by Marc Levinson.
You might think you don’t want to read a whole book about shipping containers. And Levinson is pretty self-aware about what an unusual topic he chose. But he makes a good case that the move to containerized shipping had an enormous impact on the global economy and changed the way the world does business. And he turns it into a very readable narrative. I won’t look at a cargo ship in quite the same way again.
The Most Powerful Idea in the World, by William Rosen.
A bit like The Box, except it’s about steam engines. Rosen weaves together the clever characters, incremental innovations, and historical context behind this invention. I’d wanted to know more about steam engines since the summer of 2009, when my son and I spent a lot of time hanging out at the Science Museum in London.
Harvesting the Biosphere,
by Vaclav Smil.
There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil. Here he gives as clear and as numeric a picture as is possible of how humans have altered the biosphere. The book is a bit dry and I had to look up a number of terms that were unfamiliar to me, but it tells a critical story if you care about the impact we’re having on the planet.
Why Does College Cost So Much?
by Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman.
The title is a question that seems to get more attention every year. The authors are good about not pointing fingers but instead talking about how America’s labor market affects the cost of college. My view is that as long as there’s a scarcity of college graduates, a college degree will be quite valuable. So people will pay more to get one. And if they will pay more, then colleges and universities—whose labor is provided mostly by people who paid a lot for their own degrees—can ask for more. Until you get an excess supply of graduates, then you don’t really get any price competition.
The World Until Yesterday,
by Jared Diamond.
It’s not as good as Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. But then, few books are. Diamond finds fascinating anecdotes about what life is like for hunter-gatherers and asks which ones might apply to our modern lifestyles.
Poor Numbers, by Morten Jerven.
Jerven, an economist, spent four years digging into how African nations get their statistics and the challenges they face in turning them into GDP estimates. He makes a strong case that a lot of GDP measurements we thought were accurate are far from it.
The Bet, by Paul Sabin.
Sabin chronicles the public debate about whether the world is headed for an environmental catastrophe. He centers the story on Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon, who wagered $1,000 on whether human welfare would improve or get worse over time. Without ridiculing either proponent, Sabin shows how their extreme views contributed to the polarized debate over climate change and other issues that continues today.