The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
Look again at the hand axe and the mouse. They are both ‘man-made’, but one was made by a single person, the other by hundreds of people, maybe even millions. That is what I mean by collective intelligence. No single person knows how to make a computer mouse. The person who assembled it in the factory did not know how to drill the oil well from whi
... See moreMatt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
Today, of Americans officially designated as ‘poor’, 99 per cent have electricity, running water, flush toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 per cent have a television, 88 per cent a telephone, 71 per cent a car and 70 per cent air conditioning. Cornelius Vanderbilt had none of these.
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
If economic growth does not produce happiness, said the new wisdom, then there was no point in striving for prosperity and the world economy should be brought to a soft landing at a reasonable level of income. Or, as one economist put it: ‘The hippies were right all along’.
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
I am a rational optimist: rational, because I have arrived at optimism not through temperament or instinct, but by looking at the evidence.
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
In truth, far from being unsustainable, the interdependence of the world through trade is the very thing that makes modern life as sustainable as it is.
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
the capacity of a tiny pocket calculator in 2000 would have cost you a lifetime’s wages in 1975.
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
The average South Korean lives twenty-six more years and earns fifteen times as much income each year as he did in 1955 (and earns fifteen times as much as his North Korean counter part).
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
I find the world is full of people who think that their dependence on others is decreasing, or that they would be better off if they were more self-sufficient, or that technological progress has brought no improvement in the standard of living, or that the world is steadily deteriorating, or that the exchange of things and ideas is a superfluous ir... See more
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
No single person knows how to make a computer mouse. The person who assembled it in the factory did not know how to drill the oil well from which the plastic came, or vice versa. At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
In other classes of animals, the individual advances from infancy to age or maturity; and he attains, in the compass of a single life, to all the perfection his nature can reach: but, in the human kind, the species has a progress as well as the individual; they build in every subsequent age on foundations formerly laid.