The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves.

• Author: Montanye, James A.
• Position: Book review

* The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

By Matt Ridley

New York: Harper, 2010.

Pp. 438. $26.99 cloth.

Matt Ridley is an excellent science writer who has worn many hats, including those of a scientific researcher (he holds an Oxford doctorate in zoology), a journalist (writer and editor for The Economist), a bank chairman (nonexecutive), and a venture capitalist. His previous books explain the many striking similarities between human beings and other species. In The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, he turns to explaining the differences that allow mankind to increase and prosper far beyond the potential of its closest genetic relatives. This book is a tale of natural history and of the rise and decline of human civilizations as viewed through the spectacles of Charles Darwin and Adam Smith and with the ebullient rational optimism of the late economist Julian Simon.

Economists and biologists often attribute mankind's prosperity to a genetic propensity for "reciprocal altruism": individuals' willingness and desire to cooperate, reciprocate, and trust. Other species are similarly predisposed. The essential distinction is mankind's unique ability to reciprocate not only identical goods, as apes and monkeys swap groomings, but also to exchange dissimilar goods--what Smith famously identified as the "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another" (Wealth of Nations, bk. I, chap. II). Exchange uniquely enables individuals to profit through specialization, division of labor, and comparative advantage. Ridley's theme is that "there was a point in human prehistory when big-brained, cultural, learning people for the first time began to exchange things with each other, and that once they started doing so, culture suddenly became cumulative, and the great headlong experiment of human economic 'progress' began. Exchange is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution" (p. 7), and its consequences are huge.

The consilience between economics and evolution is taken for granted nowadays, owing in large part to work by the distinguished evolution theorist (and Ridley's academic mentor) Richard Dawkins. Dawkins's path-breaking book The Selfish Gene (1976) piqued economists' interest in the nexus between competition and evolutionary development; his later book The Blind Watchmaker (1996) deepened economists' interest in F. A. Hayek's ideas about spontaneous organization's ability to outperform intentional design and...