Matt Ridley. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. 448 pages.
It seems like there’s always a market for doom and gloom, even though, for the most part, things have gotten much, much better for humanity over the past few centuries and even the past few decades. In THE RATIONAL OPTIMIST, Matt Ridley seeks to correct the record and point out that, hey, things are getting better, mostly because we’re good at working together.
Ridley, who’s written extensively about evolution, argues that innovation happens–and people become better off–when ideas have sex, that is, when people are allowed to trade technical, social, and philosophical concepts with each other. Like organism that use sexual reproduction, the ideas that result have a bit of each of their “parents” and are able to adapt to changing conditions. It’s a thought-provoking metaphor, to say the least.
Based on the title and what little I’d read of the blurb, I expected something pretty narrowly focused on the last 50 years or so. Instead, the book takes the reader far, far back to the dawn of human history, drawing on archaeological and anthropological evidence in support of Ridley’s thesis, that cooperation and specialization are what creates prosperity. Ridley’s clearly in the Hayek mold, stressing the importance of spontaneous order rather than top-down dictates in innovation and the creation of wealth. Sometimes, he over-reaches–I can’t join in his admiration for the Phoenicians after learning that they practiced infanticide–and he too often pauses the narrative to take gratuitous potshots at government and religion–the latter is particularly unfortunate, because I’d guess that a creed that teaches “don’t do unto your neighbor what is hateful to you” would be a pre-requisite for or at least a boon to the cooperation that builds specialization and therefore prosperity.
On the whole, though, there’s a great deal in THE RATIONAL OPTIMIST to like. The idea that trade, rather than war, has spurred innovation and human development, sounds too good to be true, but Ridley marshals strong evidence to prove his thesis. He makes some valid points about the desirability of urban life–even urban poverty–over rural poverty, and insists that a return to “self-sufficiency” would be disastrous for humanity, particularly the poorer segments of it. Advocates of the hundred-mile diet might think twice about limiting their options to locally-grown produce when they read that trade in agricultural products is essential to raising the standard of living in developing countries.
In short, THE RATIONAL OPTIMIST argues that we are all better off when we cooperate, and that things are likely to keep getting better if we keep working together–a feel-good idea, maybe, but one that we can’t afford to ignore.