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The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves |  | Author: Matt Ridley
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Category: Book
List Price: £20.00
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Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 3887
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.8
ISBN: 0007267118
EAN: 9780007267118
ASIN: 0007267118
Publication Date: May 27, 2010
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Product Description
Matt Ridley, acclaimed author of the classics Genome and Nature via Nurture, turns from investigating human nature to investigating human progress. In The Rational Optimist Ridley offers 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.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 16
 A dose of rational optimism August 4, 2010
Niklas Kari (Helsinki)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
The central argument of The Rational Optimist is that things in general have improved and most likely will continue improving. The books reasoning can be summarized as follows:
1. Humanity has such an astonishing track record of improving things that it is difficult to find any measure that would show any long-term worsening. By most measures things have improved vastly regardless of whether you take a view of decades or thousands of years. Why would progress stop now?
2. The gravest challenges of today are not likely to derail progress in any significant way: we have better means than ever to decrease poverty and climate change will most likely not pose significant problems for us at least before the end of the century giving us much more time to develop competitive alternatives to fossil fuels.
The author takes a very thorough view on the subject, trying to explain humans drive for progress with our evolutionary past and arguing that the human capacity for trade is a key difference to all other animals and the driving factor behind the specialization that has enable us to become so prosperous. The story of human development over thousands of years is very interestingly told and some of the comparisons of how life has improved during the last hundreds of years or even just decades are nothing short of astonishing. I think everyone should get their injection of some rational optimism.
Trade is important July 30, 2010
Sulaiman Alhasawi (Kuwait)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I enjoyed and learned alot from this book. There is alot of truth in it in the current world. It does open your eyes to many things in the world that are related to money and trade. For example, the author explains how politics, monarchies and religion use/misuse trade for good and bad. I also like very much the point that trade builds cities not the other way round. I highly recommend this book.
A challange to recieved wisdom and our self indulgent pessimism July 16, 2010
junie
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
It's a shame that so many of the "one-starers" reviews on here seem to be motivated out of political malice, rather than critical reason. References to Northern Rock and how much better Jarred Diamond's books are, certainly point to where these reviewers heads are at. If you can actually approach this book with an open mind, you will be rewarded with a methodical, well researched book written by one of the most respected science writers of our time. I think that a book like this is a very timely reminder of the broad scope of human history and it's future trajectory. In doing so, it helps us see outside of our own little bubble that we all inhabit. Although I've always believed that human society has progressed from the bottom up, there were a few points, namely about the environment, that I wasn't feeling optimistic that a balancing point could be found(I've never had much faith in the ability of politicians in finding solutions). While this book doesn't completely reassure me on this, it does correct a few popular misconceptions that, I for one, had bought into. I think anyone reading this will certainly have some of their misconceptions changed too. Any book that can achieve this is worthy of anybody's time and I thoroughly recommend it to everyone.
 Too ponderous for fiction, woefully inadequate as research July 16, 2010
AK (London)
16 out of 25 found this review helpful
First of all, I fully agree with some basic ideas presented in the book - we are, as a species better off than ever before. We are healthier, wealthier and have more choice and opportunity on average than was available at any other time in history. Trade is an important element to this development, as was specialisation. So far so Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations: Books 1-5).
This is a useful message to convey (if far from surprising) but a bit thin for a book of 438 pages, as well as not particularly novel (Adam Smith, David Ricardo and others would predate it by centuries). So the author makes some bold hypotheses - is in his own words surprised that no serious scientist or researcher gives them any credence (he laments this state of affairs on page 58) - and even though proper research or empyrical data does not support his hypotheses, he rather gloriously brushes aside inconvenient facts that let his beautiful theory be slaughtered.
So where does he fall short? His description of human evolution is pretty basic, flawed and at times downright utopian (in the sense that there is no evidence for it but the author's idea that it would fit nicely into his worldview). If this area is something you are interested in, you will do much better reading Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal or Daniel Dennet's Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (Penguin Science).
For evolution of technology and the factors that drove the increase in the speed and regional distribution of technology advances, Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years is a vastly better, more meticulously researched and scientifically supported piece of writing (which to top it off will be much more fun to read, too).
And as to the limit's of technology to tackle aspects such as ressource depletion, pollution etc. Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed or The Limits to Growth: The 30-year Update by Meadows will be a much better bet than the exuberant and somewhat unjustified optimism of Matt Ridley. All of these will agree in the sentiment that technological advance helps tackle the problems faced. However technology per se is not a panacea allowing an ever accelerating improvement to the standards of living for an ever accelerating population size. Also his thesis that all research seeing things less brightly than himself fails to take technological progress into account is not true - there actually is plenty of research that takes even accelerating technological improvements under consideration and still fails to come up with the same rosy picture (The Limits to Growth: The 30-year Update being one such example).
One often has the impression that the book was written by someone discovering lecture notes for a first year university course of economics, summarising those and then making bold predictions about the future. I guess concepts such as overshoot and collapse, limits to growth, S-curve growth and similar must either come in later years, or in the chapters after the author stopped paying attention.
On the other hand, one has to at least acknowledge that the author used many sources and that he presents many examples. Most of those are not false per se - even though many of the sources are popular science ones, rather than proper, leading edge research - but the conclusions drawn by the author clearly point to an untrained and uncritical journalist (the first year student metaphor is apt here as well), rather than to a more serious, balanced view that someone with even a modest analytical training would take - this is a bit surprising given the author's educational background (well, reading Wrong: Why Experts* Keep Failing Us-And How to Know When Not to Trust Them: Scientists, Finance Wizards, Doctors, Relationship Gurus, Celebrity Ceos, perhaps not so much). In fact the the author seems to have committed many of the errors described in Darrell Huff's How to Lie with Statistics (Penguin Business) - many of the graphs seem purposefully drawn in a way to seemingly support the author's hypotheses even if the data does not, factoids are presented out of context and are thus misleading, etc.
The author falls fully into the 'goose falacy' - a domestic goose, which is fed by humans, naturally being conditioned into the belief that its life expectancy is constantly improving, as is its quality of life (a steady, ever increasing supply of food). In fact it thinks it is best off just the morning before being slaughtered. This irrational exuberance is largely mirrored by Matt Ridley and the bold view he takes will undoubtedly sell books and let some people feel better about themselves but on the whole it truly detracts from serious debate on the subject, whichever side one decides to take.
A great counter-balance to pessimism July 13, 2010
M. Martin (England)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a great book. While there are controversial opinions expressed, nevertheless Matt Ridley makes his points about prosperity in a reasoned manner and his arguments are backed up by compelling evidence. If read with an open mind then there is much knowledge here and a valid perspective promoted. I found that later chapters offered credible counter-balance to some of the more pessimistic myths that I have heard put forward in my lifetime and the probable myths that continue to be put forward today.
The early chapters reminded me of Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything and I have enjoyed reading this book every bit as much as that one.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 16
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