The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
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.
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
Or was it? There was a serpent in the hunter-gatherer
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.
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
Chimpanzees may teach each other how to spear bushbabies with sharpened sticks, and killer whales may teach each other how to snatch sea lions off beaches, but only human beings have the cumulative culture that goes into the design of a loaf of bread or a concerto.
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.)
Specialisation encouraged innovation, because it encouraged the investment of time in a tool-making tool. That saved time, and prosperity is simply time saved, which is proportional to the division of labour.
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
Since 1800, the population of the world has multiplied six times, yet average life expectancy has more than doubled and real income has risen more than nine times. Taking a shorter perspective, in 2005, compared with 1955, the average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more c... See more
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
This is history’s greatest theme: the metastasis of exchange, specialisation and the invention it has called forth, the ‘creation’ of time.
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
There are people today who think life was better in the past. They argue that there was not only a simplicity, tranquillity, sociability and spirituality about life in the distant past that has been lost, but a virtue too. This rose-tinted nostalgia, please note, is generally confined to the wealthy.