1. If you haven’t already signed up to Audible and want one of these for free, email me the book you want (robertwiblin at gmail dot com), and the email/phone number I should send it to. (If I refer you to join by recommending a book I’ve read, we each get a free one.)

2. Some of these link to Audible UK and some to Audible US. If the link doesn’t work for you, googling the title plus ‘Audible’ will usually turn it up.

3. For a better list of audiobook recommendations than this, see Nick Beckstead’s guide.

Top 9 in alphabetical order

• Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

• Description of the very first attempts to establish cities and governments, and why they were usually cruel failures

• Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

• Hilarious book of insightful essays by David Foster Wallace, read by the author himself

• Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society

• A range of outlandish proposals for reforming our economy in order to make it more productive and fair

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

• Grand and inspiring history of how humans got where they are today, from millions of years ago to now

• Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

• Evidence-backed ways of thinking that allow you to foresee the future more accurately

• Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

• How the development of general artificial intelligence that can think faster and more clearly than humans could end badly

• The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics

• How leaders pay off the people below them in a hierarchy to stay in power, and methods they can use to increase their discretion

• The Doomsday Machine

• Why the risk of extinction from nuclear war is higher than you think and how to reduce it, written by someone who helped develop the systems we have today

• The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

• Why rational ignorance on the part of people voting in huge groups is the underlying cause of many problems in the world

Useful background information

Pressing global problems

• Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?

• Why history suggests the US and China may go to war in the 21st Century and how to prevent it

• The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

• Why history shows the risks posed by new diseases are more severe than you think, and how we could contain them

• Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

• The alarming history of nuclear weapons technology, strategy, and all those times we nearly destroyed civilization by accident

Thinking right

• The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect

• How causal diagrams can clarify many seeming paradoxes, and show us better ways to do science and causal inference

• Expert Political Judgment: How Good is it? How can We Know?

• More detailed academic book covering Tetlock’s research on whose predictions are reliable, whose aren’t, and why

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Techniques for Retraining Your Brain

• How to get out of repetitive and unproductive patterns of thought, with fascinating transcripts of real therapy sessions

• Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

• Intuitive explanations of principles from computer science that allow you to make better choices, when e.g. choosing a job, selling a house, or scheduling your day

Psychology

• The Moral Animal. Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

• How evolution explains many details of why we think and behave the way we do

• Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers

• How office politics works in big corporations

• Thinking, Fast and Slow

• Various ways our intuitions can get tripped up when thinking about situations we aren’t used to, or didn’t evolve to handle

• Made to Stick

• How to make ideas more remarkable and memorable

• The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat

• Why losing weight is hard indeed, and finding a way to get your reptilian brain to demand fewer calories is the key. Great description of how constant subconscious decisions are made.

Economics

• Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

• Why most countries remain poor because they don’t allow open entry and competition in politics or business

• Capital in the Twenty-First Century

• How wealth inequality has changed over time, and what we might do to keep it at reasonable levels

• The Undercover Economist Strikes Back

• Easy to understand explanations of most key debates in macroeconomics

• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

• History of violence and why it has probably declined

• The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money

• Why formal education isn’t as useful as people think. We confuse the success of people who performed well in education with education actually causing their success.

• Poor Economics

• Review of social science experiments performed to figure out what really helps those in extreme poverty - focus on promoting empirical methods and gradualism

Politics

• Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

• A defence of the enlightenment and why it still matters today

• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

• Epic biography of an ambitious bureaucrat and urban designer in New York whose legal scheming ultimately made him much more powerful than the mayor

Having a good career

• So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

• To have a good career you need to build skills others really need - then you will have the leverage to get the job characteristics that you want

• Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

• Will MacAskill’s manifesto of the 2014 version of effective altruism