The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
Praised by Steven Pinker as a witty, insight-packed read that genuinely shifts your perspective, Matt Ridley's 'The Rational Optimist' is a bold, provocative tour through economic history. Ridley, already well known for 'Genome' and 'The Red Queen', builds a persuasive case that commerce, innovation, and what he terms cultural evolution have been quietly, consistently improving human life for centuries. Readers who enjoyed Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs, and Steel', Niall Ferguson's 'The Ascent of Money', or Thomas Friedman's 'The World Is Flat' will find plenty here to absorb and argue over. For two hundred years, the pessimists have held the microphone, warning that catastrophe lurks just around the corner. Ridley disagrees, and he brings the numbers to back it up. Food availability is rising. Incomes are growing. Life expectancy is climbing. Rates of disease, child mortality, and violence have fallen across much of the world. Africa, he argues, is tracing the same path out of poverty that Asia walked a generation earlier. The mobile phone, the internet, and container shipping have quietly transformed ordinary lives in ways that rarely make headlines. Spanning human history from the Stone Age to the digital age, this is a refreshing, well-argued counterpoint to our collective anxiety about the future. It won't resolve every doubt you carry, but it will almost certainly complicate them in the most rewarding way.
- Author: Matt Ridley
- Publisher: Harper Perennial
- Genre: Entrepreneurship
- ISBN: 978-0061452062
- Pages: 480 pages