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The Rational Optimist [Audiobook, Unabridged]by Matt Ridley (Author), L.J. Ganser (Reader)The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity EvolvesPublished: May 2010 (All day)A counterblast to the prevailing pessimism of our age, and proves, however much we like to think to the contrary, that things are getting better.Over 10,000 years ago there were fewer than 10 million people on the planet. Today there are more than 6 billion, 99 per cent of whom are better fed, better sheltered, better entertained and better protected against disease than their Stone Age ancestors. The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going erratically upwards for 10,000 years and has rapidly accelerated over the last 200 years: calories; vitamins; clean water; machines; privacy; the means to travel faster than we can run, and the ability to communicate over longer distances than we can shout.Yet, bizarrely, however much things improve from the way they were before, people still cling to the belief that the future will be nothing but disastrous. In this original, optimistic book, Matt Ridley puts forward his surprisingly simple answer to how humans progress, arguing that we progress when we trade and we only really trade productively when we trust each other. The Rational Optimist will do for economics what Genome did for genomics and will show that the answer to our problems, imagined or real, is to keep on doing what we’ve been doing for 10,000 years — to keep on changing.From Publishers WeeklyRidley comes to praise innovation’s ability to forestall any number of doom and gloom scenarios, everything from climate change to economic catastrophe. While sounding strikingly similar to narrator Anthony Heald, L.J. Ganser keeps a steady reading pace of Ridley’s prose that keeps listeners engaged through the more challenging quantified material (statistics, data, lists) and the more nuanced conceptual material. His escalation, speed, deliberation, and pauses faithfully guide listeners through the text and at times improves upon the dry prose. However, Ganser is prone to over-project, and his forceful overemphasis can wear on the listener’s attention.Product DescriptionLife 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.NY Times ReviewA High-Five for the Invisible HandBy WILLIAM EASTERLYPublished: June 11, 2010The word “market” tends to set off a religious war. Opponents accuse proponents of blind faith in the Miracle of the Market. The proponents too often seem to confirm this accusation by overpromising and underproving what the market can do. (Opponents are often guilty of equally unthinking belief in the Immaculate Government Intervention.) Each side recites its creeds, giving heart to the faithful but making no converts.Alas, Matt Ridley’s new book, “The Rational Optimist,” which argues for markets as the dominant source of human progress, is such a case. It didn’t have to be so. Ridley, the author of “The Red Queen” and “Genome,” is a gifted science writer who could have brought a more neutral perspective to the debate. Yet he shows a surprisingly casual attitude toward logic and evidence, which is likely to cause the antimarket side to see him as rigging the contest. It’s an example of a phenomenon many economists have noted: natural scientists have remarkably low standards for reasoned argument when they discuss social science, as compared with the rigor they bring to their home fields.Ridley does synthesize a great deal of material, spinning the history of humanity from the stone ax to the computer mouse. He recites colorful stories of successive waves of traders — Ukrainians (who traded for Black Sea shells and Baltic amber as long as 18,000 years ago), Phoenicians, Mongols, Arabs, Italians — who brought early globalization. The chapters tracing the human story from 50,000 years ago through the 17th century are themselves worth the price of admission, with vivid storytelling illuminating the huge role of markets and trade in material progress.Ridley’s key concept is gains from exchange, which make possible gains from specialization, which in turn make possible technological innovation. Gains from exchange and specialization certainly rank up there with the most important economic ideas of all time. I exchange teaching with my students for the plunder from their parents’ medical practice, and we are all better off. I can specialize in the teaching I do best, and therefore do it better, and don’t have to do an endoscopy on myself.But Ridley repeats these ideas so often that the reader gets weary. He makes them into a comprehensive explanation for all of human progress, which is more weight than they can bear.One problem is that the link between specialization and technological innovation is not so clear. Certainly, specialists make promising candidates to develop further improvements in technology in their own area. Yet specialists often have the most to lose from new technologies that displace the old ones they know so well, and may want to block innovation. Perhaps this is why many breakthroughs come from creative outsiders who combine technologies generated by different specialties.Actually, combining technologies to make new technologies is another favorite idea of Ridley himself. But he is too casual about the logic of it all: in his cringe-inducing metaphor, “ideas have sex.” For example, the telephone had carnal relations with the computer, and their love child was the Internet.Ridley strains to fit the notion of ideas having sex into what he himself calls the “Procrustean bed” of his “gains from exchange” story of progress. But sharing ideas is not the same as exchanging goods. It is often accidental and involuntary: it’s hard to keep a good idea a secret, so strangers are likely to gain from your idea without your getting anything in exchange. The dissemination of ideas is therefore more mysterious than the gains from exchange of goods, and Ridley ultimately leaves us with logical loose ends rather than explanations.Next he seeks to convince us that gains from exchange of goods are indeed the crucial determinant of human progress. It is here above all where skeptical readers are likely to be alarmed by Ridley’s too frequent jumps from guesses to proofs. For example, on one page we go from the cautious statement “It is a reasonable guess that one of the pressures to invent agriculture was to feed and profit from wealthy traders” to the sudden declaration “Trade came first.” Elsewhere, the charming doubt of “Perhaps I am wrong to seek the flywheel of human progress in the gradual development of exchange and specialization. Perhaps they are symptoms, not causes. . . .” becomes “I suspect specialization is the key,” which becomes — without any further evidence being introduced — the confident assertion “The increasing specialization of the human species, and the enlarging habit of exchange, are the root cause of innovation.”Ridley’s free market history is one-­sided in another way: He stresses “market” a lot more than “free.” We hear little of the political ideals of equality and individual liberty, usually considered prerequisites for both exchange and innovation. These ideals are doubly potent because people desired them for their own sake as well as for their utility in achieving prosperity. But Ridley seems a bit equality-challenged himself. He has the disturbing tic of using the word “even” when he mentions Africa. Gains from exchange, he writes, “will enable the Chinese and the Indians and even the Africans to live as prosperously as Americans now do.” And “even Nigerians are twice as rich” as they were 50 years ago, thanks to global progress. (Disclosure: Ridley approvingly cites my own work on aid to Africa.)Nor does Ridley grapple with why so many people doubt market-based progress. His entertaining account of how such pessimism is always in fashion — whether the subject is overpopulation, genetic engineering, Y2K or global warming (he thinks we’ll all end up living on a slightly hotter but richer planet) — also predicts that today’s pessimists will ignore his message. Ridley is tone-deaf to the 20th-century traumas that were huge setbacks for the gospel of progress. “Despite the wars,” he writes, “in the half-century to 1950, the longevity, wealth and health of Europeans improved faster than ever before” — a true statement that surely misses the point.Ridley also fails to really address inequality and uncertainty. The free market may produce cornucopia, doubters concede. But it also gave Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers $60,000 a day (in 2007, the year before the company went bankrupt) while one billion other people survived on a dollar a day. In his discussion of global warming, Ridley argues that we’ve avoided all previous doomsday predictions. But our resourcefulness, or our luck, could run out sooner or later.A case for individual freedom and market exchange would have to convince doubters that alternatives would create even more inequality and uncertainty, or something worse. Such a case could argue that some of those 20th-century traumas were caused by a backlash against both the “free” and the “market,” and that central planning tends to create even more rigid inequality between political “ins” and “outs” while lacking the creativity needed to cope with future threats. But the case must move from “maybe” to logic and evidence. Alas, this book does not get there.So read “The Rational Optimist” for its fascinating history of trade and innovation. But also ponder whether the debate over markets can move forward while it remains a purely religious war. Those willing to confront honestly all the doubts about the “free market” might then actually be persuasive in arguing that it is the worst system humans have ever tried — except for all the others.William Easterly is a professor of economics at New York University and the author of “The White Man’s Burden: How the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.”The Observer (guardian.co.uk) ReviewThe Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt RidleyIn his argument against the world’s economic doom-mongers Matt Ridley has some persuasive history on his sideDavid PapineauThe Observer, Sunday 13 June 2010It was only when human learned to trade, that innovation – and prosperity – followed. Homo erectus ape-men were avid tool users. We know this because they left crafted stone axes all over the globe. But they were no innovators. Once they started making axes, they stuck to the same design for more than a million years. If you’ve seen one hand axe, you’ve seen them all. It never seemed to occur to our erectus ancestors that you could make a better hand axe.Then we modern humans arrived, and within 100,000 years or so not only devised fish hooks and farming, but steam engines, cellophane and one-click buying. What makes us so different? Why have we come so far so quickly when our hominid predecessors were stuck in a rut for thousands of generations? Matt Ridley has a simple answer. Trade. As he sees it, we owe the forward march of humankind to the benefits of barter. Homo erectus had a large brain and probably a rudimentary language. But they never saw the point of making things they could swap. Once we cottoned on to this trick, there was no stopping us. I am dexterous but weedy. You are strong but clumsy. I make the hooks and you catch the fish – and together we achieve something that neither of us could manage on our own.Ridley makes a strong case for this thesis. He takes us from the hunter-gatherers who first ventured out of Africa up to the modern moguls of Silicon Valley, and shows how humanity has built innovation on innovation in its never-ending search for new gizmos that people will want to buy. From this perspective, specialisation is the essence of humanity, and self-sufficiency a misguided myth. If you really had to make everything yourself, you would be back in the stone age, scrabbling around with hand axes. Far better to work at one thing and let the market supply the rest.Of course the path of economic progress does not always run smooth. Sudden advances are often followed by long periods of stagnation. But Ridley has an answer here, too. Just as trade fosters prosperity, so excessive government stifles it. Great civilisations are built when merchants find new markets, and decline when unproductive bureaucrats strangle their enterprise. In Ridley’s view, things work better when individual economic actors construct solutions from the bottom up. Attempts to control markets from the top down tend only to make things worse.This blanket suspicion of government is less convincing than Ridley’s enthusiasm for trade. The book’s strength, however, does not lie in its economic analysis. Ridley’s real target is those doomsayers who insist that everything is going from bad to worse and something must be done about it. He shows that such gloom-mongers have always been with us, and have always been proved wrong. The last century was particularly pessimistic. A plethora of cultural and environmental sages predicted increasing poverty, pollution and pestilence. Yet here we are with worldwide life expectancy up by more than a third in the past 50 years, cleaner air and rivers than we have enjoyed for centuries, and birth rates falling dramatically everywhere. And all this allied with an economic growth rate that means that most of those who had “never had it so good” in the 1950s would now count as below the poverty line.Much recent research suggests that increased wealth does not mean increased happiness. But Ridley points out that, even so, there is a correlation. On average, richer people are a bit happier (except, curiously, in the US). In any case, the research testifies more to the resilience of the human spirit than the unimportance of money. Cheerful people have a remarkable ability to remain cheerful, even in the face of adversity, while others are miserable souls who will be unhappy whatever happens. The corollary is that happiness is not the only index of wellbeing. No doubt most people in this country managed to be happy enough even when they were farm hands on a 70-hour week with only Christmas Day off and in constant fear of their children being struck down by disease. But don’t tell me that we are therefore no better off now we work flexible hours on computer-related tasks and take three foreign holidays a year.Ridley is no mindless Pollyanna. He knows that this is by no means the best of all possible worlds. Many millions still live in abject poverty, especially in Africa. The economic slump has destroyed jobs. The environment is over-exploited. Even so, Ridley is worried that excessive pessimism about these ills will lead to cures that are worse than the disease. On past form, things will get better if left to themselves. Fears about global warming are a particular bugbear of Ridley’s. He does not dispute the figures about likely temperature increases. But he does object to the measures proposed in response. Restrictions on carbon-based power will badly damage the poor of today in order to protect our far richer descendants from intangible dangers that they will be better able to cope with themselves.Ridley’s arguments are unlikely to convince everyone. Some people will continue to insist that everything is going to the dogs whatever evidence they are shown. But this book does present a challenge to those pessimists who are prepared to be rational.Product DetailsAudio CDPublisher: HarperAudio; Unabridged edition (May 18, 2010)Language: EnglishISBN-10: 0061992623ISBN-13: 978-0061992629Run time: 13:38:15Bit rate: 64 kbps