The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.s.) Paperback – Illustrated, June 7, 2011

Matthew White Ridley, the fifth Viscount Ridley, is a member of the British aristocracy. His family has been contributing to British intellectual and political life for generations. He is the ninth Matt Ridley to serve in the British parliament; his great grandfather Sir Edwin Lutyens was the architect who designed New Delhi in the 1920s; his great, great, great, great grandfather Dudley Marjoribanks, 1st Baron Tweedmouth, created the Golden Retriever breed. He is married to the neuroscientist Professor Anya Hurlbert. They have two children and live on the family estate at Blagdon near Newcastle upon Tyne in the north of England.Educated at Eton and Oxford, Matt achieved a first class honours degree and a DPhil in zoology then worked for The Economist for nine years as a science writer, Washington correspondent and American editor. Nowadays, he writes regular columns for the Wall Street Journal and The Times.Matt Ridley has written six books: The Red Queen, about the evolution of sexual reproduction; The Origins of Virtue, which examines human trust and virtue, and how our instinct for social exchange enables us to reap the benefits of co-operation; Genome: the autobiography of a Species in 23 chapters; Nature via Nurture, how humans are free-willed yet motivated by instinct and culture; a biography of Francis Crick, the discoverer of the genetic code; and The Rational Optimist, about how prosperity evolves. In all, his books have sold over a million copies.In The Rational Optimist, Ridley argues that our prosperity is due to our willingness to trade with strangers. This enables the division of labour; it permits us to specialize, to work on things we are good at. That encourages us to innovate, to make tools and machines and processes that make our production more efficient. We trade ideas too; we learn skills from experts; we build on what has gone before; a communal intelligence develops. Prosperity increases exponentially.Trading relationships depend on trust and building reputations. If you can be trusted then more people will deal with you. Where trade flourishes, so do other virtues. Creativity and compassion were most evident in the great commercial cities of the past; it is the same today. Ridley contrasts the retreat of civil virtues under totalitarian regimes. There is increasing urbanization as people move to the cities where they can trade and be prosperous. Cities also provide more opportunity for interactions; innovators can meet and share ideas.Ridley is scathing about the pessimists such as Paul Ehrlich who are forever forecasting doom and gloom and never apologize when their predictions do not eventuate. He says that the pessimists always assume lineal continuation of current trends; they fail to take human innovation into account.Ridley’s intellect enables him to present challenging ideas in readily accessible language. His journalistic training shows, too. His text is replete with interesting and relevant statistics, stories and anecdotes.For example:The average South Korean lives 26 more years and earns 15 times what he did in 1955.It cost 4700 hours of work to buy a Model T Ford in 1908; a much superior car can be purchased today for 1000 hours work.In USA, in 1915, one-third of agricultural land was used to feed 21 million horses; tractors have freed this land for productive use.China’s highly coerced (one-child) birth rate decline since 1955 (from 5.59 to 1.73) is almost exactly mirrored by Sri Lanka’s largely voluntary one over the same period (5.70 to 1.88).Ridley describes our current situation as follows:Human beings are not only wealthier, but healthier, happier, cleaner, cleverer, kinder, freer, more peaceful and more equal than they have ever been. This is because the source of human innovation is, and has been for 100,000 years, not the individual inspiration through reason but collective intelligence evolving by trial and error resulting from the sharing of ideas through exchange and specialization. The secret of human prosperity is that everyone is working for everybody else.The prologue to the Rational Optimist , When Ideas Have Sex became a 16-minute TED conference talk and is available on YouTube, where it has been viewed more than 2 million times.The Rational Optimist won the Hayek Prize 2011 and the Julian Simon award in 2012. It is a significant contribution to our understanding of life and prosperity.

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.