The Rational Optimist - Matt Ridley
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The Rational Optimist

Updated: 7 Sep 2020
Life is getting better—and at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down — all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people’s lives as never before. The pessimists who dominate public discourse insist that we will soon reach a turning point and things will start to get worse. But they have been saying this for two hundred years.Yet Matt Ridley does more than describe how things are getting better. He explains why. Prosperity comes from everybody working for everybody else. The habit of exchange and specialization—which started more than 100,000 years ago—has created a collective brain that sets human living standards on a rising trend. The mutual dependence, trust, and sharing that result are causes for hope, not despair.This bold book covers the entire sweep of human history, from the Stone Age to the Internet, from the stagnation of the Ming empire to the invention of the steam engine, from the population explosion to the likely consequences of climate change. It ends with a confident assertion that thanks to the ceaseless capacity of the human race for innovative change, and despite inevitable disasters along the way, the twenty-first century will see both human prosperity and natural biodiversity enhanced. Acute, refreshing, and revelatory, The Rational Optimist will change your way of thinking about the world for the better.
Entrepreneur
273 followers
85 FLIISTs
over 5 years ago
This next book argues the opposite -- that economic progress is the greater force is pushing society forward. I'm interested to see which idea resonates more after exploring both frameworks. This is also the second one of Ridley's books I've read this year. Here's a photo from a few weeks back of me reading his book Genome with my dog Beast.
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Entrepreneur, Philosopher
24 followers
249 FLIISTs
4 years ago
Matt Ridley's "The Rational Optimist" is the most brilliant and enlightening book I've read in years. He has written 4 of my top 20
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Blogger, Business Coach
7 followers
89 FLIISTs
over 4 years ago
I don’t know if you’ve ever read the book The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley, but he talks about how basically progress is a one-way street and it’s gotten better and better for the last 80,000 generations, and so to think that suddenly it’s going to turn around and go negative doesn’t make a lot of sense.
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