Matt Ridley, acclaimed author of the classics Genome and Nature via Nurture, turns from investigating human nature to investigating human progress. In The Rational Optimist Ridley offers a counterblast to the prevailing pessimism of our age, and proves, however much we like to think to the contrary, that things are getting better.
Over 10,000 years ago there were fewer than 10 million people on the planet. Today there are more than 6 billion, 99 per cent of whom are better fed, better sheltered, better entertained and better protected against disease than their Stone Age ancestors.
The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going erratically upwards for 10,000 years and has rapidly accelerated over the last 200 years: calories; vitamins; clean water; machines; privacy; the means to travel faster than we can run, and the ability to communicate over longer distances than we can shout. Yet, bizarrely, however much things improve from the way they were before, people still cling to the belief that the future will be nothing but disastrous.
In this original, optimistic book, Matt Ridley puts forward his surprisingly simple answer to how humans progress, arguing that we progress when we trade and we only really trade productively when we trust each other.
The Rational Optimist will do for economics what Genome did for genomics and will show that the answer to our problems, imagined or real, is to keep on doing what we've been doing for 10,000 years – to keep on changing.
Markus
2023-04-12
Matt Ridley's rational optimist refuels Adam's Smith libertarian philosophy of prosperity famously expalained in his "The Wealth of Nations." Innovation occurs when ideas meet and breed, something that the history of trade and paternalism has proven countless times. He opposed the common held belief that our past is brighter than our future and mentions a long list of putative reasons for such believes. In every case, pessimists have failed to consider new solutions to current problems, falling into a cognitive trap of way to linear thinking: something that is getting worse must continue to do so forever. But as long as communication remains free and the problems seen, people will continue solving them. Money is not even the strongest incentive for it. This is where me critique begins. Many of the problems of the future are of such a scale that we have to prevent them before they become very evident. We cannot react to extinction if it's sudden. Likewise, collective action problems and ethical dilemmas that call for meta-moralities must have a non-emotional solution. Curiosity and improvement for your own group will not solve these problems, but rather make it worse. I'm deeply disappointed that Ridley never takes on the problems of AI, engineered pandemics, and neuro- and nanotechnology, because I fear his arguments don't hold here.
Rikard
2021-08-11
Ger ett annorlunda hoppfullt perspektiv! Han kan mycket väl ha rätt i de stora dragen, köp inte allt du hör bara. Källkritik är lika viktig här som i vilken annan skriven text/talat ord som helst. Hans övertro på att bränna kolväten och vägran att tro på solkraft/vattenkraft/vindkraft är för mig motbjudande. Det går även emot hans egna teorier om att nödvändigheten till utveckling kommer att driva utvecklingen, så varför skjuta ner pionjärerna i nästa eras energigenerering?
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