The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
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The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Matt Ridley (Author), L. J. Ganser (Narrator), HarperAudio (Publisher)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 2,947 ratings
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Life is getting better at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people's lives as never before.

The pessimists who dominate public discourse insist that we will soon reach a turning point and things will start to get worse. But they have been saying this for 200 years.

Yet Matt Ridley does more than describe how things are getting better. He explains why. Prosperity comes from everybody working for everybody else. The habit of exchange and specialization, which started more than 100,000 years ago, has created a collective brain that sets human living standards on a rising trend. The mutual dependence, trust, and sharing that result are causes for hope, not despair.

This bold book covers the entire sweep of human history, from the Stone Age to the Internet, from the stagnation of the Ming empire to the invention of the steam engine, from the population explosion to the likely consequences of climate change. It ends with a confident assertion that thanks to the ceaseless capacity of the human race for innovative change, and despite inevitable disasters along the way, the 21st century will see both human prosperity and natural biodiversity enhanced. Acute, refreshing, and revelatory, The Rational Optimist will change your way of thinking about the world for the better.

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  1. Listening Length
    13 hours and 37 minutes
  2. Author
    Matt Ridley
  3. Narrator
    L. J. Ganser
  4. Audible release date
    May 18, 2010
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    HarperAudio
  7. ASIN
    B003MY7RGG
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
  10. See all details
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Product details

Listening Length 13 hours and 37 minutes
Author Matt Ridley
Narrator L. J. Ganser
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com Release Date May 18, 2010
Publisher HarperAudio
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B003MY7RGG
Best Sellers Rank #13,579 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
#19 in Economic History (Audible Books & Originals)
#20 in Future Studies
#28 in History of Civilization

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
2,947 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Peter Francis Fenwick
5.0 out of 5 stars Man's Willingness to Trade with Strangers makes him Rich
Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2014
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Matthew White Ridley, the fifth Viscount Ridley, is a member of the British aristocracy. His family has been contributing to British intellectual and political life for generations. He is the ninth Matt Ridley to serve in the British parliament; his great grandfather Sir Edwin Lutyens was the architect who designed New Delhi in the 1920s; his great, great, great, great grandfather Dudley Marjoribanks, 1st Baron Tweedmouth, created the Golden Retriever breed. He is married to the neuroscientist Professor Anya Hurlbert. They have two children and live on the family estate at Blagdon near Newcastle upon Tyne in the north of England.
Educated at Eton and Oxford, Matt achieved a first class honours degree and a DPhil in zoology then worked for The Economist for nine years as a science writer, Washington correspondent and American editor. Nowadays, he writes regular columns for the Wall Street Journal and The Times.

Matt Ridley has written six books: The Red Queen, about the evolution of sexual reproduction; The Origins of Virtue, which examines human trust and virtue, and how our instinct for social exchange enables us to reap the benefits of co-operation; Genome: the autobiography of a Species in 23 chapters; Nature via Nurture, how humans are free-willed yet motivated by instinct and culture; a biography of Francis Crick, the discoverer of the genetic code; and The Rational Optimist, about how prosperity evolves. In all, his books have sold over a million copies.

In The Rational Optimist, Ridley argues that our prosperity is due to our willingness to trade with strangers. This enables the division of labour; it permits us to specialize, to work on things we are good at. That encourages us to innovate, to make tools and machines and processes that make our production more efficient. We trade ideas too; we learn skills from experts; we build on what has gone before; a communal intelligence develops. Prosperity increases exponentially.

Trading relationships depend on trust and building reputations. If you can be trusted then more people will deal with you. Where trade flourishes, so do other virtues. Creativity and compassion were most evident in the great commercial cities of the past; it is the same today. Ridley contrasts the retreat of civil virtues under totalitarian regimes. There is increasing urbanization as people move to the cities where they can trade and be prosperous. Cities also provide more opportunity for interactions; innovators can meet and share ideas.

Ridley is scathing about the pessimists such as Paul Ehrlich who are forever forecasting doom and gloom and never apologize when their predictions do not eventuate. He says that the pessimists always assume lineal continuation of current trends; they fail to take human innovation into account.

Ridley’s intellect enables him to present challenging ideas in readily accessible language. His journalistic training shows, too. His text is replete with interesting and relevant statistics, stories and anecdotes.
For example:
The average South Korean lives 26 more years and earns 15 times what he did in 1955.
It cost 4700 hours of work to buy a Model T Ford in 1908; a much superior car can be purchased today for 1000 hours work.
In USA, in 1915, one-third of agricultural land was used to feed 21 million horses; tractors have freed this land for productive use.
China’s highly coerced (one-child) birth rate decline since 1955 (from 5.59 to 1.73) is almost exactly mirrored by Sri Lanka’s largely voluntary one over the same period (5.70 to 1.88).

Ridley describes our current situation as follows:
Human beings are not only wealthier, but healthier, happier, cleaner, cleverer, kinder, freer, more peaceful and more equal than they have ever been. This is because the source of human innovation is, and has been for 100,000 years, not the individual inspiration through reason but collective intelligence evolving by trial and error resulting from the sharing of ideas through exchange and specialization. The secret of human prosperity is that everyone is working for everybody else.

The prologue to the Rational Optimist , When Ideas Have Sex became a 16-minute TED conference talk and is available on YouTube, where it has been viewed more than 2 million times.

The Rational Optimist won the Hayek Prize 2011 and the Julian Simon award in 2012. It is a significant contribution to our understanding of life and prosperity.
17 people found this helpful
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Bruce Irving
5.0 out of 5 stars Dare to be an optimist (with good reason)
Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2010
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This is a little embarrassing, but right now, right in front of you, millions of ideas are having sex. They might be having it right inside this Amazon review page. I know, freaky, right? According to author Matt Ridley, the secret of humans' success is exchange, and while trade in physical objects is a big part of that, the exchange of ideas is really the thing that has kept this whole civilization thing moving forward for the last 10,000 years or so, and especially in the last 200 years. And when it comes to ideas having sex, the Internet is the ultimate "swingers' club."

Ridley's book "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves" is quite a bit more serious than that first paragraph makes it sound, but it does describe a key point. He says, "Without trade, innovation just does not happen. Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. It stimulates novelty." Another key thing that exchange and trade allow is specialization. Self-sufficiency sounds good in theory (and in practice if you are in a basic survival situation), but when it comes to growth, prosperity, and happiness (all closely linked), specialization means more of everything for everybody. If multiple people in a community have different skills and products, and if exchange is allowed, everyone has the potential to benefit from the knowledge and output of everyone else. Ideas are especially valuable in part because sharing an idea is like lighting a candle for someone else - now you both have a lighted candle (or an idea of how to do something better). When knowledge is shared in a community, it becomes something like a "collective brain." And when the community expands to include the entire world, interconnected by vast transportation networks and with the Internet as its central nervous system, you can have the wild orgy of exchange of ideas, goods, and services that we call the modern world.

Ridley spends most of the book in a chronological journey through the development of civilization, from the first inklings of exchange and specialization some 200,000 years ago (when we really diverged from other species including our close cousins the apes), through expanded barter systems, to the development of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. Of course climate stability had a lot to do with that as well, but an interesting point is that trade is what really made agriculture interesting and worthwhile. There was also the development of energy sources, from human power (including slavery, unfortunately), to animal power, to various forms of "current solar" energy (water power, wind power, burning wood, etc.), to various forms of "stored solar" (coal, oil, natural gas). There are more steps, but it's clear that the modern world is based to a great extent on exchange and specialization, including free trade and the free exchange of ideas. These have in turn produced a wide range of innovations in social systems and technology and led to the astounding prosperity that most (but of course not all) people in the world enjoy today. Ridley points out that while Louis XIV used some 498 servants to prepare his meals, a modern person of average means has many more people working for him or her (mostly indirectly and on a shared basis) to make easily available food, clothing, medicines, transportation, entertainment, and everything else that we take for granted in modern life. In this sense the average person today is richer than a king in the seventeenth century.

But if things are so great and getting better all the time, why are so many people so pessimistic about the present and the future? Ridley doesn't have a good explanation for this, though he knows he's fighting from a minority position (optimists must be naive!), and he shows that it has always been so. People were fretting over "peak coal" in 1830, and convinced that things had improved so much in the previous half century that there could be no place to go but down. But of course the rest of the nineteenth century was in fact a golden age of technological and social development. Things like slavery and child labor declined not so much because people became nicer, but because energy sources and manufacturing methods made them less necessary (or you could say affordable).

The Rational Optimist is not really an ideological work. While there is a strong sense that Ridley believes that markets generally work better than governments (especially corrupt governments like many in Africa), he's not saying that governments are not necessary. He's certainly a strong proponent for free trade and individual rights, which are strongly correlated with a sense of well-being or "happiness." He also believes that things will continue to get better, even for Africa, as long as we keep moving forward in terms of trade and openness. Although anything can happen including terrorism, crazy governments, natural disasters, etc., his optimism is based on considerations of history and of how things really work, not on wishful thinking or on some belief that prosperity is humanity's right or destiny. It's more or less what we do.

I personally tend toward optimism myself, and this book has given me a lot to think about including many reasons for optimism that I hadn't thought about before. I highly recommend this book.
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ENRIQUE BARRANCO OJEDA
5.0 out of 5 stars llego antes de lo estimado
Reviewed in Mexico on November 15, 2022
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llego bien
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Challenges your thinking about a number of current topics
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 31, 2024
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With 24/7 soon and gloom this book makes you rethink your ideas and beliefs. Highly recommended as a good read.
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emilio
5.0 out of 5 stars Lectura obligatoria para entender el mundo en que vivimos.
Reviewed in Spain on December 4, 2023
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El libro que los estatistas, totalitarios, activistas climáticos, ingenieros sociales y agoreros varios no quieren que leas.
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emilio
5.0 out of 5 stars Lectura obligatoria para entender el mundo en que vivimos.
Reviewed in Spain on December 4, 2023
El libro que los estatistas, totalitarios, activistas climáticos, ingenieros sociales y agoreros varios no quieren que leas.
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cat47
5.0 out of 5 stars Une vraie pépite, à savourer sans modération
Reviewed in France on December 23, 2019
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Dans cet essai très documenté, Matt Ridley explique le développement économique à partir des comportements humains, sa thèse étant que par rapports aux autres animaux, l’homme est le seul à montrer des comportements d’échange et de spécialisation, ce qui a conduit notre espèce à démontrer des capacités d’adaptation hors normes et à trouver des solutions innovantes à tous les obstacles rencontrés jusqu’à présent, même dans les milieux les plus hostiles. L’espèce humaine à réussi à s’imposer et à dominer la planète grâce à la spécialisation et au commerce, ainsi que par la fertilisation croisée des idées. Plusieurs grandes étapes ont été nécessaires mais passer de l'utilisation d'énergie «musculaire » à d’autres sources a permis, difficilement et par étapes successives, à venir à bout de l'esclavage (qui existe toujours, mais au moins plus de manière légale) tout en élevant petit à petit le niveau de vie. Pour commercer et se libérer de l’économie de subsistance (donc de la pauvreté), il faut surmonter d’abord la peur innée de l’Autre. Une société basée sur des échanges (la fameuse « Société des Inconnus » de Paul Seabright) permet la division du travail, encourage à innover, à fabriquer et à échanger des outils, des machines et des processus qui rendent notre production plus efficace. Nous échangeons des idées aussi et nous acquérons des compétences tout en construisant, sur la base des idées et des technologies qui nous ont précédés, une intelligence et un savoir-faire communs.

Ridley n’a pas de mots trop durs contre les pessimistes tels que Paul Ehrlich, qui ne cessent de prédire le malheur et la morosité et ne reviennent jamais sur leurs propos lorsque leurs prédictions alarmistes ne se matérialisent pas. Selon lui, les pessimistes basent leurs projections sur des tendance à court terme dont ils font des projections linéaires, sans tenir compte des évolutions et ruptures dues à l'innovation humaine. Le livre regorge de données historiques chiffrées, de faits et d'anecdotes pertinentes. Quelques exemples :
- Actuellement, le Sud-Coréen moyen vit 26 ans de plus et gagne 15 fois son salaire de 1955.
- L’achat d’une Ford modèle T en 1908 coûtait à 4’700 heures de travail; de nos jours, une voiture bien plus luxueuse peut être achetée pour 1’000 heures de travail.
- Aux États-Unis, en 1915, un tiers des terres agricoles était utilisé pour nourrir 21 millions de chevaux, occupés à divers travaux, en ville et à la campagne; le progrès technique (tracteurs, engrais) a libéré ces terres pour une utilisation plus efficace.
- En Chine, après 50 ans d’une politique de l’enfant unique extrêmement contraignante, le taux de natalité est passé de 5,59 à 1,73 enfants par femme. Durant la même période, avec une politique libérale de développement, le Sri Lanka, grâce à une amélioration du bien-être matériel de sa population, est parvenu à un résultat quasi identique (passant de 5,70 à 1,88 enfants par femme) sans mesure autoritaire du gouvernement.

Riche de nombreuses informations et basés sur des faits avérés, ce livre se lit très facilement, on reconnaît le journaliste à l'aise dans la compilation et dans la communication. Vous l’aurez peut-être deviné, Matt Ridley est libertarien et… favorable au Brexit. ^^

Le prologue de The Rational Optimist, "When Ideas Have Sex", est devenu une conférence TED de 16 minutes, disponible sur YouTube. Ridley y donne un petit cours d’économie plein d’humour dans lequel il cite avec à propos les deux pères de l’économie classique, Adam Smith et David Ricardo.
Et pour finir, la citation de La Richesse des Nations, de Adam Smith, en exergue du livre :
"The division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.

Whether this propensity be one of those original principles in human nature of which no further account can be given; or whether, as seems more probable, it be the necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech, it belongs not to our present subject to inquire. It is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals, which seem to know neither this nor any other species of contracts."
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Juan
1.0 out of 5 stars Poor print quality
Reviewed in Singapore on June 1, 2022
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Poor print quality
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