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Matt Ridley (2010) – the Rational Optimist, How Prosperity Evolves
Apr
Matt Ridley (2010) – the Rational Optimist, How Prosperity Evolves
Ideas have sex, in Ridley’s schema; they follow a process of natural selection of their own, and as long as they continue to do so, there is reason to retire apocalyptic pessimism about the future of our species. Erstwhile zoologist, conservationist, and journalist, Ridley (The Red Queen) posits that as long as civilization engages in exchange and specialization, we will be able to reinvent ourselves and responsibly use earthly resources ad infinitum. Humanity’s collective intelligence will save the day, just as it has over the centuries. Ridley puts current perceptions about violence, wealth, and the environment into historical perspective, reaching back thousands of years to advocate global free trade, smaller government, and the use of fossil fuels. He confidently takes on the experts, from modern sociologists who fret over the current level of violence in the world to environmentalists who disdain genetically modified crops. An ambitious and sunny paean to human ingenuity, this is an argument for why ambitious optimism is morally mandatory. (June)
From Financial Times
Samuel Brittan writes: “The whole book could be regarded as a marriage of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin. Alfred Marshall, the late 19th-century economist, whose Principles of Economics were inflicted on generations of British students, strongly believed that economics should be studied from a biological point of view but was himself unable to advance beyond mechanical analogies. Ridley has begun to do just this and he has done so without equations and a minimum of jargon.”
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