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The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves |  | Author: Matt Ridley
Publisher: Harper
Category: Book
List Price: $26.99
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Rating:  60 reviews
Sales Rank: 1743
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 448
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.4
ISBN: 006145205X
Dewey Decimal Number: 339.2
EAN: 9780061452055
ASIN: 006145205X
Publication Date: June 1, 2010
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Product Description
Life is getting better—and at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down — all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people's lives as never before. The pessimists who dominate public discourse insist that we will soon reach a turning point and things will start to get worse. But they have been saying this for two hundred years. Yet Matt Ridley does more than describe how things are getting better. He explains why. Prosperity comes from everybody working for everybody else. The habit of exchange and specialization—which started more than 100,000 years ago—has created a collective brain that sets human living standards on a rising trend. The mutual dependence, trust, and sharing that result are causes for hope, not despair. This bold book covers the entire sweep of human history, from the Stone Age to the Internet, from the stagnation of the Ming empire to the invention of the steam engine, from the population explosion to the likely consequences of climate change. It ends with a confident assertion that thanks to the ceaseless capacity of the human race for innovative change, and despite inevitable disasters along the way, the twenty-first century will see both human prosperity and natural biodiversity enhanced. Acute, refreshing, and revelatory, The Rational Optimist will change your way of thinking about the world for the better.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 60
 Will our future be 2,000 more years of immanent apocalypse? May 8, 2010
Steve Summers (San Diego)
138 out of 156 found this review helpful
First, the GOOD NEWS: the sky isn't falling! The world is actually improving dramatically and the pace is quickening. Tthere are abundant facts to prove it. The BAD NEWS predicted isn't true after all. The not-so-good news is that good news doesn't sell newspapers or prime-time ads. So we'll keep on hearing that doomsday drumbeat of horrific predictions from the media, all of it certified by officials of academia and government with an obvious agenda in the vision of impending environmental collapse which can only be averted by comparably drastic intervention. We have a glut of popular books and articles feeding these fears with plausible evidence for the demise of civilization or the planet, but a critical shortage of books like "The Rational Optimist" which challenge that evidence, describe its pathologies, and show where those disastrously coercive interventions will lead, and what they'll cost in human terms. So why risk ostracism in cocktail-party conversation by reading a persuasive contrarian essay which proclaims a heretical optimism in its title?
Well, one reason might be the pleasures of an utterly readable book. Unlike talk-show polemicists, Matt Ridley uses good-natured eloquence, serious erudition and incisive wit to deflate the immanent-disaster scenarios which dominate our evening news, academic and political discourse. Despite its length, the book is remarkable for its brevity and the sheer quotability of its prose. (A reader cribbing zinger quotes will soon have writer's cramp.)
Another reason might be the challenge of unfamiliar ideas, of cleaning the mental attic of the baggage left by cultural osmosis. No book can guarantee final truth, but a fresh perspective can provide plenty of creative stimulation for a skeptical mind. Ridley's long view of human history, his perspective on the unrequited human penchant for seeing immanent catastrophe informs both his skepticism and his optimism, and it makes great straight-to-the point reading. No obfuscatory jargon, no shrill hype or invective.
Two of his unfashionable heresies are A) that prosperity is a hugely positive benefit to humanity--not a planet-killing consumerist fetish, and that B) individual freedom--not government planning or humanitarian intent--is the primary engine of that prosperity. His earlier book, "The Red Queen" described sex as the primary engine of evolution. The sexual metaphor gets new life in this one. The explosive growth of human knowledge and wealth in recent centuries is described as the result of "ideas having sex"--something that rarely occurred in prior millennia. It's not a coincidence that science, individual liberty, and the industrial revolution experienced a virtually simultaneous birth. This "sex" between ideas has been increasing in both quality and frequency with cumulative results of stunning usefulness. Think of what's happened in your own lifetime.
He's also compiled a list of dire prophecies which never happened, some of which are perennially predicted anew with updated "tipping point" projections: worldwide starvation, hydrocarbon exhaustion, mass extinctions, nuclear extermination, mineral resource depletion, genetic decay (eugenics was invented to prevent that) global cooling (global warming could be next if the last decade's weather stasis continues). Environmental problems which were once big news (acid rain, industrial hormone mimicry, lung-rotting smog, skyrocketing cancer proliferation, holocaust viral epidemics, etc.) quietly vanished from the news when the threat receded or failed to produce significant harm, much less bio-Armageddon. A historical batting average of .000 has done little to discourage fresh predictions of the apocalypse.
A minor focus is the relatively harmless rash of costly and often foolish environmental fads. He writes penetrating analyses the value and costs of organic farming, local food, and the obsessive horror of modern chemistry, fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically modified crops.
His more deserving targets (I think) are the dubious "green" technologies with high--often disastrous--environmental costs: ethanol in particular, but also solar, wave & wind power. He's not opposed to the latter energy options in principal, but shows they're unlikely to replace hydrocarbons anytime soon. Most of these alternative energy "cures" are not only environmentally worse than the "disease" (fossil fuel), but their their high costs will be borne in heavy disproportion by the world's poor. But for dogmatic insensitivity, few examples can match the righteous zeal of some activists for preventing America's poor from shopping at WalMart, for shutting the developing nations out of the global economy, or keeping genetically modified food out of the hands of literally starving Africans. A corollary widespread belief (Ridley quotes some prominent advocates) is that prosperity itself is the enemy of the planet and global salvation must necessarily entail global impoverishment--in effect, a lethal Malthusian population limit waiting to be imposed by environmental decree.
Ridley avoids a pro or con position on global warming, but he's rightly wary of reacting in panic: the cost of overestimating GW could be much higher than underestimating: in his words, it's like stopping a nosebleed by putting a tourniquet around your neck. (It would be even more foolish in response to a predicted nosebleed.) But he didn't write this book to heap ridicule on doomsellers. He shows why they're always wrong: linear extrapolation from the present inevitably predicts a disastrous future--which is invariably wrong because it ignores the equally inevitable (but unpredictable) free market actions which future investors, entrepreneurs and inventors will take to sidestep the icebergs in the shipping lanes. Ideas "having sex" are far more nimble and productive than governments issuing prohibitions or doomsday prophets clamoring for an emergency reversal of course.
(My note: only in inflexible dictatorships does mass civilian disaster arrive inexorably, as in Ukraine in the 1930s, China in the 1960s, North Korea today. In none of these regimes were (any) ideas allowed to "have sex". Unfortunately, just such a dictatorship will probably be necessary if the world decides to implement the Environmental Taliban's agenda to save us from planetary sacrilege.)
"The Rational Optimist" is a wonderfully well-written counterpoint to the alarmist feel-bad prophecies (which will probably continue to outsell it) but it is not overtly political nor brimming with righteous denunciations. It is at least as rewarding as an insightful tract on human nature (and folly) and as much a call to reason as survey of contemporary intellectual hysteria and prejudice. I enjoyed reading it immensely, and unless you are allergic to bad news about the BAD NEWS, I think you will, too.
The Future is Rationally Bright July 14, 2010
J. Dretler (Tucson, AZ USA)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Differentiation of individual activity, specialization and trade are the activities that have enabled humankind to overcome obstacles in the past and advance at a rapid pace. The future should be no different.
According to Matt Ridley, trade was and is the essential element in human progress. He suggests that the first farmers were already traders and used their static location and accumulated inventory to meet hunter-gatherer demand. He also credits the farmer as the creator of property rights. Hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian sharing the hunt and enforcing non-compliance. A farmer who plants a field expects to harvest it and store or trade the surplus. This, Ridley posits was the origin of private wealth.
Ridley maintains that progress is dependent on idea sharing. As population density increases, the availability of new ideas and differentiation of occupation allows those with extra time to make use of these ideas.
Twentieth century collectivist bias leads one to ask "who was in charge" looking for a central initiator of policy. Ridley suggests that the world is a complex adaptive system, where trade and progress emerged from the interaction of individuals. It was an evolutionary rather than a planned process.
He recounts historical examples of institutional and industrial stagnation from the Bronze Age to British Rail and the U.S. Postal Service. What Ridley says they have in common is an attitude that rewards caution and discourages experiment. A planned economy requires perfect knowledge. The possibility of new knowledge makes a steady state or economic equilibrium model invalid.
He says the Dark Ages were a massive back to the land hippie movement minus the trust funds, similarly the Maoist Cultural Revolution.
Ridley thinks that governments tend to be good initially, but increasingly bad the longer they last. `Government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs.' Governments `employ ambitious elites who capture an increasingly greater share of the society's income by interfering in peoples lives and creating rules to enforce until they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs'
African poverty, hunger, climate change, resource depletion, and disease are all challenges that an intellectually evolving human race will conquer.
Individual creativity within a bottom-up political structure and a free-market economy will increase our individual wealth, health, and longevity according to Matt Ridley.
A Landmark and happily subversive book May 26, 2010
Barry Milliken (New York, NY USA)
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
I can't do better that repeat Steven Pinker's endorsement from the dust jacket:
" A delightful and fascinating book, filled with insight and wit, which will make you think twice and cheer up."
It's also filled with historical insights into human psychological and social evolution from prehistory through the present day.
This book is in fact the latest in a long line of lonely books explaining why spontaneous order (unconscious and unplanned) works so amazingly well, and bravely speaking out against the dominant pessimism that always reigns. Ridley cites these authors liberally: Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Hayek, Julian Simon, Bjorn Lomberg. Since all these men are heroes of mine, I needed little convincing. I am already a committed optimist.
But a part of me is deeply pessimistic. That's because as always, the dominant view of the elites and the media everywhere is global pessimism. Political "leaders" everywhere believe the opposite of what this book teaches. And they mostly push for well intended but misguided policies that will guarantee that bad outcomes occur. John Holdren, Obama's chief science advisor, will not read this book, but he believes passionately the exact opposite of everything it explains.
Matt Ridley understands all this, and his frustration with counterproductive policies (like Biofuels) is clearly stated. But the question is "Why are humans so intent on pessimism?" As someone fairly expert in evolutionary psychology, I was hoping Ridley would shed some light on this. A related question is "Why do humans prefer top down hierarchies to spontaneous order."
My own hypothesis goes something like this:
For hundreds of thousands of years, (and before trading occurred) our prehistoric ancestors evolved in small tribal bands, in desperate scarcity, and in constant total war with other tribes, deadly animals, and a harsh environment. In such a situation, a tribal band must operate with the discipline of a combat army. Survival was completely dependent on rigid conformity, obedience to authority, and the assumption that everything that moves is a potential threat motivated by conscious intent.
Only in the last few hundred years have some civilizations allowed the spontaneous order of billions of individual decisions to generate far greater benefit than top down systems do. But our primitive past is so deeply imbedded in our mental genes, that most people still believe in gods, "great" leaders and/or socialism.
My only other quibble with Ridley concerns his bias for markets but against financial markets which he sees as corrupt or exploitative. He is correct to see a difference, but he needs to read more Hayek to understand why. The answer is that financial markets are built on anti market foundations: fiat money printed by governments to serve political ends and price fixing of interest rates by central banks which loan money to banks at favored rates not given to others. This leads to markets distortions, mispriced risk, malinvestment, fraud and periodic bubbles.
Rational Optimist July 16, 2010
Michael Revy
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
The world's innovation rate makes us all Luddites! Mat Ridley gives perspectives on understanding the current ferociously changing times. He is the recipe for overcomming vogueish Malthusian 'end of the world' 'expert' views (ie. static vs dynamic). A terrific read - especially comments regarding evolutionary links to free trade, Botswanna and global warming. Great historical examples of both wealth creation/destruction. I submit to his "Name a Phoenician emperor" taunt!
Fun, fascinating, controversial July 19, 2010
Laurel (Illinois, USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
The basic premises:
(1) In the course of human history, people have lived increasingly prosperous, comfortable lives. This statement might seem surprising at first, but only because of the common tendency to paint the (unexperienced) past in rosy hues. On closer examination, the average inhabitant of a modern country lives a life kings of the past would envy.
(2) The drive behind this ongoing improvement is trade, both of goods and ideas. Not charitable works or government regulation, necessary though those might both be in certain circumstances. No, people left to their own devices will find clever ways to solve pressing problems, bettering themselves, their customers, and often the world, in the process.
(3) Given (1) and (2), the current climate of DOOM is not well-founded. Yes, we *might* be doomed, but there's no particular reason to assume that mankind can't handle whatever challenges lie ahead, using our rapidly-increasing capacity for idea exchange. However convincing current predictions of DOOM may be, there were equally convincing predictions in the past, and they all turned out to be wrong. Sure, there were occasional setbacks and issues, but overwhelmingly, life in the modern era has continued to rapidly improve, despite predictions of famine, plagues, ice ages, over-population, killer air pollution, acid rain, and much more.
For me, the most fascinating parts of the book were about ancient prehistory of trade, and various historical trends and developments. Less interesting, though more controversial, are the later chapters about modern issues like global warming and poverty in Africa. Though they're important topics, they're still largely theoretical on all sides. No one knows how bad climate change will be, or what we will wind up doing about it. No one knows yet if/when/how Africa will attain prosperity. I'm more interested in facts than debate, though I realize the current-event chapters will get all the talk at cocktail parties.
The only real weakness I perceived were the vague, unnecessarily inflammatory potshots taken at archetypes Ridley sees as enemies of trade: kings, priests, financiers, taxmen, monopolies, bureaucrats. Whenever historical economic progress foundered, these generic targets get the blame, without much real explanation.
I've heard criticism that Ridley is unreservedly opposed to governments and regulation, but that was not my impression. I came away with the feeling that the right kind of government was absolutely necessary to prosperity, not no government at all. He criticizes places like the USSR, modern-day North Korea, and 1800s Japan, while pointing out Botswana and Silicon Valley as places doing it right.
Overall, this is a fun, fascinating book to read. Essential, IMO, for anyone who wants to discuss current events in a balanced way. Whatever your stance, be prepared to have your own nose tweaked a bit, as Ridley is generous with his snark.
Highly recommended.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 60
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