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WillowOne's Positions

The Rational Optimist

Overview

Subtitled How Prosperity Evolves. Ridley's thesis is that human progress comes from exchange: when people trade, ideas as well as goods meet and recombine, and the result is a cumulative, collective intelligence that no individual possesses. He traces this from the first evidence of long-distance barter among early humans through agriculture, cities, the industrial revolution and the internet, arguing that at every stage the pessimists predicted collapse and were wrong, and that living standards, lifespans and freedom have improved for almost everyone almost everywhere. The last chapters argue that the pessimism of the present, about population, resources and climate, will prove wrong for the same reasons.

Notes

The first two-thirds of this book are excellent and the last third is where I get off. Ridley is right that exchange is the engine, that specialisation is what makes us rich, and that the historical record of doom-mongering is dismal; this is the economic companion to The Better Angels of Our Nature, and both are a rebuke to the idea that the past was better. But a good track record for optimism is a prior, not an argument, and on climate he uses it as a substitute for engaging with the evidence. The lesson I take is his own: trust the data, not the mood.

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