Here are 100 books that Doing Good Better fans have personally recommended if you like
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I work in the venture capital (finance) space but have a long-time passion for and involvement with charity and philanthropy work, having founded several non-profits including most recently Lever Foundation which works to create a more humane and sustainable food system in Asia. I’m a big believer in and advocate for applying quantitative, analytical thinking and an outcome-focused mindset to efforts to make the world a better place. It’s something I think about every day, and it’s what I write about as well.
Ray Dalio is one of the most successful hedge fund managers of all time. You might ask what that has to do with doing good in the world, but I think it’s abundantly clear that many of the same principles and approaches that lead to quantifiable success in the business world can contribute to increased success in efforts to make the world a better place.
I don’t agree with Dalio on everything, but I found his core messages such as focusing on results, being direct and candid with colleagues, weighing the credibility of someone’s opinion based on their history of performance, and continually reassessing and adjusting our approach, very wise and a way of thinking and working that is too often absent in the charity sector.
"Significant...The book is both instructive and surprisingly moving." -The New York Times
Ray Dalio, one of the world's most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he's developed, refined, and used over the past forty years to create unique results in both life and business-and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals.
In 1975, Ray Dalio founded an investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Forty years later, Bridgewater has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
William MacAskill is an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Oxford. At the time of his appointment, he was the youngest associate professor of philosophy in the world. He cofounded the nonprofits Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism, and Y Combinator–backed 80,000 Hours, which together have moved over $300 million to effective charities. He is the author of Doing Good Betterand What We Owe The Future.
The Scout Mindset is one of the best books I know on reasoning clearly and developing a truth-seeking attitude. Galef argues that instead of being like “soldiers,” who engage in wishful thinking by defending the ideas they most want to believe, we should be more like “scouts,” whose goal is to actually find out what is true. The book includes some of the latest research on the skills and habits one needs to be an excellent reasoner.
Winner of best smart thinking book 2022 (Business Book Awards) Guardian best books of 2021
'Original, thought-provoking and a joy to read' Tim Harford
'Highly recommended. It's not easy to become (more of) a scout, but it's hard not to be inspired by this book' Rutger Bregman
When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a 'soldier' mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalising in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe…
I’ve always been drawn to science books that ask the big questions - about the universe, humanity, and the challenges we face. As a kid, I would spend hours reading about the mysteries of space, technology, and philosophy, captivated by the way these fields intersect. My fascination with AI and complex systems deepened during my time in the Army, where I began to see how technology could shape global security in profound and often unpredictable ways. Today, I explore these ideas as a researcher and educator, focusing on the risks and ethical dilemmas of AI and autonomous systems. I hope the books on this list spark your curiosity.
Toby Ord’s sobering and deeply researched examination of existential threats explores pivotal challenges like climate change, nuclear war, and AI. I’m fascinated by his thoughtful analysis, which positions humanity at a crossroads where our choices today could determine whether we thrive or collapse.
This book aligns closely with many of my own concerns, particularly in its discussion of AI as a potential existential risk. Ord’s emphasis on responsible stewardship of powerful technologies echoes my concerns about autonomous weapons and the unpredictability of AI decision-making. His call for ethical governance and adaptation in global security is crucial as we determine AI’s role in shaping humanity’s future.
This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time.
If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence.…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
I have spent over a decade studying and teaching digital media, communication, and technology policy, while also working in journalism and media production. My passion for this topic comes from watching how technology quietly reshapes everyday life, from how people form relationships to how societies govern themselves. I am fascinated by the space where media, culture, and human behavior intersect, especially when change feels invisible but profound. Writing and reading about AI helps me make sense of these transformations, and I care deeply about helping people remain thoughtful, ethical, and human in an increasingly algorithmic world.
I was fascinated by how this book explains the "glitches" in AI as reflections of our own human flaws.
It made me look at my own biases in a whole new way. I love how the author tells stories about the history of technology to show why it is so hard to teach a machine what humans actually value.
Even though the topic sounds technical, I found the writing very conversational and gripping. It felt like reading a detective story where the "mystery" is our own morality. It left me thinking deeply about what it really means to be a "good" person in a world where machines are learning from us and sometime ask us are you human?
Today's "machine-learning" systems, trained by data, are so effective that we've invited them to see and hear for us-and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Recent years have seen an eruption of concern as the field of machine learning advances. When the systems we attempt to teach will not, in the end, do what we want or what we expect, ethical and potentially existential risks emerge. Researchers call this the alignment problem.
Systems cull resumes until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases. Algorithms decide bail and parole-and appear to assess Black…
We’re a nonprofit that aims to help people have a positive social impact with their careers. Since you have, on average, 80,000 hours in your career, what you decide to do with that time might be your biggest opportunity to make a difference. Over the past ten years, we’ve conducted careful research into high-impact careers, and have helped thousands of people plan a career that has a high positive impact.
Future generations might be very much impacted by the actions we take today: with climate change, nuclear war, or the changes in global values. But we often don’t take their interests into account.
In this book, Will argues that positively influencing the fate of future generations is a key moral priority of our time and that there are things we can do today to make them better off. This may be one of the most important books of our time.
“This book will change your sense of how grand the sweep of human history could be, where you fit into it, and how much you could do to change it for the better. It's as simple, and as ambitious, as that.” —Ezra Klein
An Oxford philosopher makes the case for “longtermism” — that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.
The fate of the world is in our hands. Humanity’s written history spans only five thousand years. Our yet-unwritten future could last for millions more — or it could…
The world of entrepreneurship has been my driving passion for decades. Why? It is entrepreneurs, despite their many quirks, who make the world a better place. It’s entrepreneurs who create jobs in a world where jobs in many places are in short supply. It’s entrepreneurs who wake up every day with a passion to forge their own path with the freedom to do so. And it’s why I embarked at mid-life on a second career as a business-school professor. It’s why I teach and why I write. The books I suggest here will give you a fighting chance to deal effectively with the challenges you’ll surely find along your entrepreneurial journey.
Zook and Allen are two of the most insightful people I know. I’ve taught their “stuff’ to my students for many years. Entrepreneurship is a journey that’s not for the faint of heart, for there are the inevitable gale-force winds that threaten to blow you off course, as this book so clearly demonstrates.
If every founder would imbue his or her company with the founder’s mentality and follow Zook’s and Allen’s advice about how to keep it in place, we’d have far more long-run successes than today’s daunting failure statistics so sadly display.
A Washington Post Bestseller Three Principles for Managing--and Avoiding--the Problems of Growth Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment: find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers. But when Bain & Company's Chris Zook and James Allen, authors of the bestselling Profit from the Core, researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external--increasing distance from the front lines, loss…
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
I work in the venture capital (finance) space but have a long-time passion for and involvement with charity and philanthropy work, having founded several non-profits including most recently Lever Foundation which works to create a more humane and sustainable food system in Asia. I’m a big believer in and advocate for applying quantitative, analytical thinking and an outcome-focused mindset to efforts to make the world a better place. It’s something I think about every day, and it’s what I write about as well.
I couldn’t agree more with Rutger’s central thesis: that the overlap between those who are most ambitious and success-driven, and those who spend their working hours focused on doing good in the world, is a heck of a lot smaller than it should be.
This is a great wake-up call to the best and brightest who are spending all of that energy, creativity, and intelligence on things that might make them a decent salary but that have no real impact on the world.
From the author of the New York Times bestsellers Humankind and Utopia for Realists—“a more politically radical Malcolm Gladwell” (The New York Times)—comes a bold manifesto daring us to harness our talents and transform our idealism into action, all with the goal of making the world a wildly better place.
A career consists of 2,000 workweeks, and how you spend that time is one of the most important decisions of your life. Still, millions of people are stuck in in mind-numbing, pointless, or just plain harmful jobs.
There's an antidote to this waste of talent, and it's called moral ambition.…
I work in the venture capital (finance) space but have a long-time passion for and involvement with charity and philanthropy work, having founded several non-profits including most recently Lever Foundation which works to create a more humane and sustainable food system in Asia. I’m a big believer in and advocate for applying quantitative, analytical thinking and an outcome-focused mindset to efforts to make the world a better place. It’s something I think about every day, and it’s what I write about as well.
Peter Singer has been called “the most influential living philosopher”, and his writing certainly influenced the trajectory of my own life (including leading me to care a lot about the excruciating suffering that farm animals and other animals are made to endure).
He has a lot of good books, but this one drives home, in a very simple and down-to-earth fashion, how you and I can literally save lives.
For the first time in history, eradicating world poverty is within our reach. Yet around the world, a billion people struggle to live each day on less than many of us pay for bottled water. In The Life You Can Save, Peter Singer uses ethical arguments, illuminating examples, and case studies of charitable giving to show that our current response to world poverty is not only insufficient but morally indefensible. The Life You Can Save teaches us to be a part of the solution, helping others as we help ourselves.
I am Professor of Experimental Economics at the University of Auckland where my work lies at the interface of economics and psychology. In a discipline (and a world) that tends to emphasize human self-interest, I have always been interested in our willingness to engage in unselfish behavior. Incentivized decision-making experiments with human participants where payments depend on the nature of their decisions are a powerful way of analyzing behavior. Are people willing to put their money where their mouth is? My background running experiments made me well-positioned to study some of these questions; a lot of them in collaboration with other social scientists including psychologists and political scientists.
I am tempted to say: Because Frank is a delightful writer and leave it at that.
This book reiterates similar themes in discussing how a variety of supposedly non-economic factors affect economic decisions.
In this book Frank discusses how noble human tendencies (moral sentiments) may have not only survived the pressures of the material world, but actually have been nurtured by them. The title is a play on the David Hume quote that “Reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
To those interested, I also recommend any of Frank’s other books including Choosing the Right Pond, The Winner Take All Society, and The Darwin Economy.
The idea rests on a simple paradox, namely, that in many situations the conscious pursuit of self-interest is incompatible with its attainment. We are all comfortable with the notion that someone who strives to be spontaneous can never succeed. So too, on brief reflection, will it become apparent that someone who always pursues self-interest is doomed to fail.
We moved to New Orleans in July 2005. We had six weeks in our first home, filling it with furniture, buying a new car, and taking advantage of my first job. When Hurricane Katrina collapsed the levees holding back the nearby lakes, our home – and those of 80% of the city – filled with water. As I waited for FEMA and insurance to help us, I saw instead it was our friends, friends of friends, and faith-based organizations that helped us get back on our feet. Using our own experiences as a start, I traveled to India and Japan to study how communities around the world survived and thrived during shocks.
We have all seen disaster movies and TV shows with people screaming and running around as the earthquake, tsunami, or Godzilla strikes. But Rebecca Solnit argues instead that normal people don’t panic during disasters – it is the elite, the wealthy, and the decision-makers who lose their minds. For normal people, altruism and mutual aid help all of us get through shocks, whether fire, car accident or COVID19. Her writing is excellent and she uses examples across time and space, ranging from the San Francisco earthquake at the start of the 20th century to the Mexico City earthquake at its end.
"The freshest, deepest, most optimistic account of human nature I've come across in years." -Bill McKibben
The most startling thing about disasters, according to award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides. A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster's grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of…
