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Screw the Apocaholics -- The Optimists’ Case

Written by: Paul Kedrosky

Article Overview: The NYT has a review/summary of Matt Ridley’s latest, “The Rational Optimist”. Worth a read in its entirely, but here are some excerpts from the John Tierney piece:

Screw the Apocaholics -- The Optimists’ Case

The NYT has a review/summary of Matt Ridley's latest, "The Rational Optimist". Worth a read in its entirely, but here are some excerpts from the John Tierney piece: "Forget wars, religions, famines and poems for the moment," Dr. Ridley writes. "This is history's greatest theme: the metastasis of exchange, specialization and the invention it has called forth, the ‘creation' of time."

...In ancient Babylon, it took more than 50 hours to pay for [an hour of reading] light from a sesame-oil lamp. In 1800, it took more than six hours of work to pay for it from a tallow candle. Today, thanks to the countless specialists producing electricity and compact fluorescent bulbs, it takes less than a second.

... "Empires bought stability at the price of creating a parasitic court; monotheistic religions bought social cohesion at the expense of a parasitic priestly class; nationalism bought power at the expense of a parasitic military; socialism bought equality at the price of a parasitic bureaucracy; capitalism bought efficiency at the price of parasitic financiers."

Progress this century could be impeded by politics, wars, plagues or climate change, but Dr. Ridley argues that, as usual, the "apocaholics" are overstating the risks and underestimating innovative responses.

"The modern world is a history of ideas meeting, mixing, mating and mutating," Dr. Ridley writes. "And the reason that economic growth has accelerated so in the past two centuries is down to the fact that ideas have been mixing more than ever before."

... But with new hubs of innovation emerging elsewhere, and with ideas spreading faster than ever on the Internet, Dr. Ridley expects bottom-up innovators to prevail. His prediction for the rest of the century: "Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands."

More here.

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Article Tags: dr ridley, excerpts, famines, invention, john tierney, matt ridley, metastasis, nyt, optimist, optimists, poems, religions, screw, specialization



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