The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)

Or was it? There was a serpent in the hunter-gatherer

But so long as somewhere somebody is incentivised to invent ways of serving others’ needs better, then the rational optimist must conclude that the betterment of human lives will eventually resume.

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

only four things to do during the day: sleep, eat, avoid being eaten and socialise (by which I mean mark a territory, pursue a member of the opposite sex, nurse a fawn, whatever). There is no real need to do much else. Now imagine you are a human being. Even if you only count the basic things, you have rather more than four things to do: sleep, eat

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.

This is history’s greatest theme: the metastasis of exchange, specialisation and the invention it has called forth, the ‘creation’ of time.