"The twenty-first century will be a magnificent time to be alive."
I heard about the book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves when it came out last year, I forget where from (it's possible it was reviewed in New Scientist). It sounded incredibly interesting and I made a mental note to buy it sometime. The other week I found it in The Works for £2.99, bought a copy, and immediately began devouring it - putting aside the two books I'd been reading to do so.
The core idea is one that I haven't encountered before, at least not in the way Matt Ridley expresses it, but makes a lot of sense: the prime reason for the rise and subsequent dominance of humanity is exchange.Somewhere in Africa more than 100,000 years ago, a phenomenon new to the planet was born. A Species began to add to its habits, generation by generation, without (much) changing its genes. What made this possible was exchange, the swapping of things and services between individuals. This gave the Species an external, collective intelligence far greater than anything it could hold in its admittedly capacious brain. Two individuals could each have two tools or two ideas while each knowing how to make only one. Ten individuals could know between them ten things, while each understanding one. In this way exchange encouraged specialisation, which further increased the number of different habits the Species could have, while shrinking the number of things that each individual knew how to make. Consumption could grow more diversified, while production grew more specialised.
I have, over the years, been somewhat addicted to doom-laden prognostications of humanity's fate. I own The End Of The World - The Science And Ethics Of Human Extinction along with several peak oil books, and Jared Diamond's Collapse, an exploration of several collapsed civilisations. I own the film What A Way To Go: Life At The End Of Empire which discusses peak fossil fuels, climate change, and species extinction and the almost-inevitable demise of human civilisation as a result of these. I've downloaded or streamed over a dozen similar films, and spent many hours reading websites devoted to peak oil etc..
This massive dose of gloom was partially balanced by reading New Scientist fairly frequently, and having read large amounts of Robert Anton Wilson at an impressionable age ("An optimist can find ten solutions for every problem a pessimist finds," to paraphrase one of his lines, and he had a Julian Simon outlook on resource depletion). A childhood spent reading large amounts of science fiction also left me hungering for Mars colonies and interstellar travel, so I kept my fingers crossed that humanity might survive long enough to achieve this.
The Rational Optimist would have met with Robert Anton Wilson's approval, I'm sure. It prevents a solid case against the prevailing pessimism of our times, spending 359 pages fleshing out the H.G. Wells quote "It is the long ascent of the past that gives the lie to our despair."
I have a habit of making notes on my phone (I sometimes use bits of paper, but then I tend to lose them) when reading an interesting book. I made six such notes while reading J.K. Galbraith's The Affluent Society (a fascinating read), but made seventeen notes while reading The Rational Optimist. It has given me much food for thought.If my great grand-daughter reads this book in 2100 I want her to know that I am acutely aware of the inequality of the world I inhabit, a world where I can worry about my weight and a restaurant owner can moan about the iniquity of importing green beans by air from Kenya in winter, while in Darfur a child's shrunken face is covered in flies, in Somalia a woman is stoned to death and in Afghanistan a lone American entrepreneur builds schools while his government drops bombs.
It is precisely this 'evitable' misery that is the reason for pressing on urgently with economic progress, innovation and change, the only known way of bringing the benefits of a rising living standard to many more people. It is precisely because there is so much poverty, hunger and illness that the world must be very careful not to get in the way of the things that have bettered so many lives already - the tools of trade, technology and trust, of specialisation and exchange. It is precisely because there is still so much further to go that those who offer counsels of despair or calls to slow down in the face of looming environmental disaster may be not only factually but morally wrong. (Emphasis mine)
The book could be subtitled "How Free Market Capitalism Will Continue To Save Us" and some may find its political ideology unpalatable (although he's certainly not a "the free market will solve everything" type, lauding the conversation movement amongst other things), but I would recommend reading it to anybody. Whether you agree with it or not, it will certainly make you think.
The core idea is one that I haven't encountered before, at least not in the way Matt Ridley expresses it, but makes a lot of sense: the prime reason for the rise and subsequent dominance of humanity is exchange.Somewhere in Africa more than 100,000 years ago, a phenomenon new to the planet was born. A Species began to add to its habits, generation by generation, without (much) changing its genes. What made this possible was exchange, the swapping of things and services between individuals. This gave the Species an external, collective intelligence far greater than anything it could hold in its admittedly capacious brain. Two individuals could each have two tools or two ideas while each knowing how to make only one. Ten individuals could know between them ten things, while each understanding one. In this way exchange encouraged specialisation, which further increased the number of different habits the Species could have, while shrinking the number of things that each individual knew how to make. Consumption could grow more diversified, while production grew more specialised.
I have, over the years, been somewhat addicted to doom-laden prognostications of humanity's fate. I own The End Of The World - The Science And Ethics Of Human Extinction along with several peak oil books, and Jared Diamond's Collapse, an exploration of several collapsed civilisations. I own the film What A Way To Go: Life At The End Of Empire which discusses peak fossil fuels, climate change, and species extinction and the almost-inevitable demise of human civilisation as a result of these. I've downloaded or streamed over a dozen similar films, and spent many hours reading websites devoted to peak oil etc..
This massive dose of gloom was partially balanced by reading New Scientist fairly frequently, and having read large amounts of Robert Anton Wilson at an impressionable age ("An optimist can find ten solutions for every problem a pessimist finds," to paraphrase one of his lines, and he had a Julian Simon outlook on resource depletion). A childhood spent reading large amounts of science fiction also left me hungering for Mars colonies and interstellar travel, so I kept my fingers crossed that humanity might survive long enough to achieve this.
The Rational Optimist would have met with Robert Anton Wilson's approval, I'm sure. It prevents a solid case against the prevailing pessimism of our times, spending 359 pages fleshing out the H.G. Wells quote "It is the long ascent of the past that gives the lie to our despair."
I have a habit of making notes on my phone (I sometimes use bits of paper, but then I tend to lose them) when reading an interesting book. I made six such notes while reading J.K. Galbraith's The Affluent Society (a fascinating read), but made seventeen notes while reading The Rational Optimist. It has given me much food for thought.If my great grand-daughter reads this book in 2100 I want her to know that I am acutely aware of the inequality of the world I inhabit, a world where I can worry about my weight and a restaurant owner can moan about the iniquity of importing green beans by air from Kenya in winter, while in Darfur a child's shrunken face is covered in flies, in Somalia a woman is stoned to death and in Afghanistan a lone American entrepreneur builds schools while his government drops bombs.
It is precisely this 'evitable' misery that is the reason for pressing on urgently with economic progress, innovation and change, the only known way of bringing the benefits of a rising living standard to many more people. It is precisely because there is so much poverty, hunger and illness that the world must be very careful not to get in the way of the things that have bettered so many lives already - the tools of trade, technology and trust, of specialisation and exchange. It is precisely because there is still so much further to go that those who offer counsels of despair or calls to slow down in the face of looming environmental disaster may be not only factually but morally wrong. (Emphasis mine)
The book could be subtitled "How Free Market Capitalism Will Continue To Save Us" and some may find its political ideology unpalatable (although he's certainly not a "the free market will solve everything" type, lauding the conversation movement amongst other things), but I would recommend reading it to anybody. Whether you agree with it or not, it will certainly make you think.