Bill Gates presents his seven top reads in 2013 Commenting on the lack of novels on the list, Gates writes:

"It’s not that I don’t enjoy fiction. I’ve read The Catcher in the Rye a bunch of times—it’s one of my favorite books ever (and I enjoyed Salinger, the documentary that came out this year). I did read Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, which was entertaining though it didn’t have as much science fiction as I expected. But I read mostly nonfiction because I always want to learn more about how the world works. And reading is how I learn best."

1.The Box, by Marc Levinson

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger is a non-fiction book by Marc Levinson charting the historic rise of the intermodal container (shipping container) and how it changed the economic landscape of the global economy.The New York Times called it "a smart, engaging book".The book inspired the name for the "The Box" project run by BBC News from September 2008 onwards, in which the BBC were tracking a container for a period of one year. The Box won a bronze medal in the Independent Publisher Book Awards (2007) in the "Finance/Investment/Economics" category.The Box was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award (2006). The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger is a non-fiction book by Marc Levinson charting the historic rise of the intermodal container (shipping container) and how it changed the economic landscape of the global economy.The New York Times called it "a smart, engaging book".The book inspired the name for the "The Box" project run by BBC News from September 2008 onwards, in which the BBC were tracking a container for a period of one year. The Box won a bronze medal in the Independent Publisher Book Awards (2007) in the "Finance/Investment/Economics" category.The Box was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award (2006).

2.The Most Powerful Idea in the World, by William Rosen William Rosen, seeks to answer these questions and more with The Most Powerful Idea in the World. A lively and passionate study of the engineering and scientific breakthroughs that led to the steam engine, this book argues that the very notion of intellectual property drove not only the invention of the steam engine but also the entire Industrial Revolution.first sustained era of economic improvement. To do so, Rosen conjures up an eccentric cast of characters, including the legal philosophers who enabled most the inventive society in millennia, and the scientists and inventors;Thomas Newcomen, Robert Boyle, and James Watt;who helped to create and perfect the steam engine over the centuries. With wit and wide-ranging curiosity, Rosen explores the power of creativity, capital, and collaboration in the brilliant engineering of the steam engine and how this power source, which fueled factories, ships, and railroads, changed human history.

3.Harvesting the Biosphere, by Vaclav Smil The biosphere -- the Earth's thin layer of life -- dates from nearly four billion years ago, when the first simple organisms appeared. Many species have exerted enormous influence on the biosphere's character and productivity, but none has transformed the Earth in so many ways and on such a scale as Homo sapiens. In Harvesting the Biosphere, Vaclav Smil offers an interdisciplinary and quantitative account of human claims on the biosphere's stores of living matter, from prehistory to the present day. Smil examines all harvests -- from prehistoric man's hunting of mega-fauna to modern crop production -- and all uses of harvested biomass, including energy, food, and raw materials. Without harvesting of the biomass, Smil points out, there would be no story of human evolution and advancing civilization; but at the same time, the increasing extent and intensity of present-day biomass harvests are changing the very foundations of civilization's well-being.

4.The World Until Yesterday, by Jared Diamond The World Until Yesterday provides a mesmerizing firsthand picture of the human past as it had been for millions of years—a past that has mostly vanished—and considers what the differences between that past and our present mean for our lives today. This is Jared Diamond’s most personal book to date, as he draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. Diamond doesn’t romanticize traditional societies—after all, we are shocked by some of their practices—but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have much to teach us. A characteristically provocative, enlightening, and entertaining book, The World Until Yesterday will be essential and delightful reading.

5.Poor Numbers, by Morten Jerven One of the most urgent challenges in African economic development is to devise a strategy for improving statistical capacity. Reliable statistics, including estimates of economic growth rates and per-capita income, are basic to the operation of governments in developing countries and vital to nongovernmental organizations and other entities that provide financial aid to them. Rich countries and international financial institutions such as the World Bank allocate their development resources on the basis of such data. The paucity of accurate statistics is not merely a technical problem; it has a massive impact on the welfare of citizens in developing countries. Where do these statistics originate? How accurate are they? Poor Numbers is the first analysis of the production and use of African economic development statistics. Morten Jerven's research shows how the statistical capacities of sub-Saharan African economies have fallen into disarray. The numbers substantially misstate the actual state of affairs. As a result, scarce resources are misapplied. Development policy does not deliver the benefits expected. Policymakers' attempts to improve the lot of the citizenry are frustrated. Donors have no accurate sense of the impact of the aid they supply. Jerven’s findings from sub-Saharan Africa have far-reaching implications for aid and development policy. As Jerven notes, the current catchphrase in the development community is "evidence-based policy," and scholars are applying increasingly sophisticated econometric methods—but no statistical techniques can substitute for partial and unreliable data.

6.Why Does College Cost So Much?, by Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman This book offers a different view. To explain rising college cost, the authors place the higher education industry firmly within the larger economic history of the United States. The trajectory of college cost is similar to cost behavior in many other industries, and this is no coincidence. Higher education is a personal service that relies on highly educated labor. A technological trio of broad economic forces has come together in the last thirty years to cause higher education costs, and costs in many other industries, to rise much more rapidly than the inflation rate. The main culprit is economic growth itself. This finding does not mean that all is well in American higher education. A college education has become less reachable to a broad swathe of the American public at the same time that the market demand for highly educated people has soared. This affordability problem has deep roots. The authors explore how cost pressure, the changing wage structure of the US economy, and the complexity of financial aid policy combine to reduce access to higher education below what we need in the 21st century labor market. This book is a call to calm the rhetoric of blame and to instead find policies that will increase access to higher education while.

7.The Bet, by Paul Sabin The Bet weaves the two men’s lives and ideas together with the era’s partisan political clashes over the environment and the role of government. In a lively narrative leading from the dawning environmentalism of the 1960s through the pivotal presidential contest between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and on into the 1990s, Paul Sabin shows how the fight between Ehrlich and Simon—between environmental fears and free-market confidence—helped create the gulf separating environmentalists and their critics today. Drawing insights from both sides, Sabin argues for using social values, rather than economic or biological absolutes, to guide society’s crucial choices relating to climate change, the planet’s health, and our own.

Reference:

http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-best-books-2013-12 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box:_How_the_Shipping_Container_Made_the_World_Smaller_and_the_World_Economy_Bigger http://www.amazon.com/The-Most-Powerful-Idea-World/dp/0226726347 http://www.amazon.com/Harvesting-Biosphere-What-Taken-Nature/dp/026201856X http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Until-Yesterday-Traditional/dp/0670024813 http://www.amazon.com/Poor-Numbers-Development-Statistics-Political/dp/080147860X http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-College-Cost-Much/dp/0199744505 http://www.amazon.com/The-Bet-Ehrlich-Julian-Earth%C2%92s/dp/0300176481