The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

Nonfiction

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

Matt Ridley

            Pessimism with regards to future of human race or for that matter in context of all species of living organisms on earth and the earth itself is all pervading in intelligentsia. Belief that quality of our lives will be worse in the future is so well entrenched that anyone who harbours a contrary view will be considered ignorant. Matt Ridley claims in this book that human beings have been experiencing increasingly more prosperous life since their origin. He further postulates that trade is the cause of this incessant rise in our quality of lives.

            In an early chapter he cites innumerable statistics to illustrate his contention that prosperity is increasing. Life has only moved towards increasing affluence: from meteoric rise in life expectancy and hugely reduced incidence of disease, availability of a plethora of commodities from toilet paper to supersonic aircrafts for air travel, increased per capita incomes, and availability of time and means for entertainment. Ridley ingeniously cites availability of artificial light to illustrate how our basic needs have become cheaper. He mentions the fact that an hour of labour would have earned twenty-four lumen hours in 1750AD and now it earns 8.4 million lumen hours. In the next chapter he postulates that this prosperity of mankind resulted from the origin of trade and exchange of ideas among groups of people. He coins the term ‘sex amongst ideas’, like sex among individuals which ensures passage & proliferation of mutant genes in the species. He speculates that this propensity to trade, barter, truck and exchange goods and services must have a genetic origin in human beings and this is the characteristic which made and continues to make life more prosperous for humans with the passage of time. He argues that trade between people engenders trust in society as trade can only prosper in a milieu of cooperation. He cites various experiments in psychology which have concluded that human beings inherently trust their trading partners. In a further chapter he talks about growth in agriculture and food production, evolution of cities and the role they played in improving life of their inhabitants and how mankind escaped the Malthusian trap- A condition where excess population would stop growing due to scarcity of food and consequently starve. In all this and in abolition of the practice of slave -keeping he sees the omnipresent hand of trade.

            It is true that people inherently believe a person who prophesies doom and despair rather one who is optimistic about future. In a chapter he talks about various ‘turning points’ in our recent history which the professors of doomsday prophesied would see either the end of mankind or rise of unparalleled miseries. These were in various guises: famines, cancer, nuclear Armageddon, exhaustion of natural resources etc. All these supposed turning points have come and gone and mankind has continued its march towards greater prosperity. In the penultimate chapter he discusses two great issues which continue to attract pessimists today, Africa and climate change. He offers his view why he believes that abject pessimism regarding both is untrue and misleading.

            The relentless warnings and the cornucopia of prophesies of apocalypse have so invaded the media these days that a reassurance about the growth of human prosperity, happiness, health and general wellbeing sounds like a sweet, becalming melody in this frighteningly deafening din. And if this contention is backed with more than three hundred pages of cogent, well researched and convincing arguments, it’s a story worth reading.