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.)
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 Cornelius Vanderbilt or Henry Ford not only moves you faster to where you want to go, but requires you to work fewer hours to earn the ticket price, then he has enriched you by granting you a dollop of free 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.
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.)
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.)
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.)
Even in 1970 only 36 per cent of all Americans had air conditioning: in 2005 79 per cent of poor households did.
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
Getting richer is not the only or even the best way of getting happier. Social and political liberation is far more effective, says the political scientist Ronald Ingleheart: the big gains in happiness come from living in a society that frees you to make choices about your lifestyle – about where to live, who to marry, how to express your sexuality... See more