I have presented the case for sunny optimism. I have argued that now the world is networked, and ideas are having sex with each other more promiscuously than ever, the pace of innovation will redouble and economic evolution will raise the living standards of the twenty-first century to unimagined heights, helping even the poorest people of the worl

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In this book I have tried to build on both Adam Smith and Charles Darwin: to interpret human society as the product of a long history of what the philosopher Dan Dennett calls ‘bubble-up’ evolution through natural selection among cultural rather than genetic variations, and as an emergent order generated by an invisible hand of individual transacti

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The four horsemen of the human apocalypse, which cause the most premature and avoidable death in poor countries, are and will be for many years the same: hunger, dirty water, indoor smoke and malaria, which kill respectively about seven, three, three and two people per minute. If you want to do your fellow human beings good, spend your effort on co

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In forums like this, aid could be democratised, taken out of the hands of inefficient international bureaucrats and corrupt African officials, taken away from idealistic free-market shock therapists, separated from arms deals, removed from big industrial projects, distanced from patronising do-gooders and given person-to-person. A rich country coul

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Moreover, in recent years much aid has been granted on condition of free-market economic reform, which far from kick-starting economic growth, frequently proves damaging to local traditions, undermining the very mechanisms that get enrichment started. As William Easterly puts it while criticising the shock therapy that did such harm in both the Sov

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Some of the most urgent needs of Africa can surely be met by increased aid from the rich world. Aid can save lives, reduce hunger, deliver a medicine, a mosquito net, a meal or a metalled road. But statistics, anecdotes and case histories all demonstrate that the one thing aid cannot reliably do is to start or accelerate economic growth. Aid to Afr

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Today, the drumbeat has become a cacophony. The generation that has experienced more peace, freedom, leisure time, education, medicine, travel, movies, mobile phones and massages than any generation in history is lapping up gloom at every opportunity. In an airport bookshop recently, I paused at the Current Affairs section and looked down the shelv

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Let me make a square concession at the start: the pessimists are right when they say that, if the world continues as it is, it will end in disaster for all humanity. If all transport depends on oil, and oil runs out, then transport will cease. If agriculture continues to depend on irrigation and aquifers are depleted, then starvation will ensue. Bu

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The wonderful thing about knowledge is that it is genuinely limitless. There is not even a theoretical possibility of exhausting the supply of ideas, discoveries and inventions. This is the biggest cause of all for my optimism. It is a beautiful feature of information systems that they are far vaster than physical systems: the combinatorial vastnes

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