The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves.

• Author: Powell, Aaron Ross
• Position: Book review

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

Matt Ridley

New York: Harper, 2010, 448 pp.

Science writer Matt Ridley is, as the title of his new book suggests, optimistic about humanity's future--and not just at the prospect of even better lives for those lucky enough to have excellent lives already, but at the possibility of radically transforming, for the better, the lives of those today suffering near the bottom. The key, he thinks, is economic growth, that boogeyman of naysayers and concerned citizens everywhere. "It is precisely because there is still so much further to go that those who offer counsels of despair or calls to slow down in the face of looming environmental disaster may be not only factually but morally wrong," he argues. The path to that better world 100 years from now will not be smooth. Mankind is likely to experience traumas both of a natural sort and of its own creation. Most troubling, "The wrong kind of chiefs, priests and thieves could yet snuff out future prosperity on earth." Ridley doesn't let this possibility get him down. Humans are too driven to trade, exchange their ideas, and imagine new ones for a few bad apples to ruin the future.

Ridley arrives at the optimism on display in The Rational Optimist by answering, with vast historical scope, the crucial question "Why are people rich?" Libertarians have long understood that the more common query "Why are people poor?" misses the point. Poverty grips humanity by default, just as it grips all species. Ridley's story of man's ascent hits the high notes of history, moments often overshadowed by clashing states and conflicting ideas. At the core of his story sits the colorful metaphor of "ideas having sex." Just as ideas may fight, they may also fall in love. The offspring of these unions are central both to understanding our past and guiding the way to an even better future. Where the book stumbles--its argument for trade's "creation" of the human mind and a muddy distinction between mere pessimism and genuine cause for concern--it finds its feet again quickly. At a time when the world seems to offer little to be optimistic about, Ridley provides a necessary and welcome reminder that our lot has been much worse. Today is stupendously good by historical standards, and things are only going to get better.

The book's scope is huge. In the last chapter, however, Ridley admirably gets the essence of The Rational Optimist into three sentences:

In this book I have tried to build on both Adam Smith and Charles Darwin: to interpret human society as the product of a long history of what the philosopher Dan Dennett calls "bubble-up" evolution through natural selection among cultural rather than genetic variations, and as an emergent order generated by an invisible hand of individual transactions, not the product of a top-down determinism. I have tried to show that, just as sex made biological evolution cumulative, so exchange made cultural evolution cumulative and intelligence collective, and that there is therefore an inexorable tide in the affairs of men and women...