Sustainability, Audio Books, and Podcasts

I’ve just finished listening to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse . I highly recommend both.

The issue of sustainability has increasingly got my attension and Collapse is an excellent study of civilization’s sustainability struggle. My recent MBA studies have had me researching the effects of globalization on inequality rates—that is, are the gaps between the rich and the poor increasing or decreasing and how is globalization affecting this trend. In approaching this problem we assume to prefer to decrease the gap by pulling up the bottom, not by dragging down the top. However, Diamond argues that current first world living conditions are already unsustainable and should we “succeed” in globalizing first world standards we risk an overall collapse. This is not really the bulk of his book, Collapse, but given what I’ve already recently been reading, it’s the thought I walked away with.

I started listening to audio books when I began my MBA program almost a year ago. At the time I was looking to fill my commute to downtown Pittsburgh. However now I get much more listening time during my weekly travel between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Thus far I’ve listened to:

• 1776 by David McCullough
• Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner
• The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman
• Anasni Boys by Neil Gaiman
• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
• Irrational Exhuberance by Robert Shiller
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
• Getting Things Done by David Allen
• The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
• Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
• Collapse by Jared Diamond

I’ve also been listening to Venture Voice , Chinese Pod , Ruby on Rails Podcast , and Feathercast (Apache’s podcast). I’m particularly interested in listening to more Chinese podcasts, so if anyone has any suggestions, let me know.