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The Rational Optimist
- How Prosperity Evolves
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins
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Publisher's summary
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.
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Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China, and Northeastern Brazil.
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Mike Davis on Audible!
- By Nathan D. Backlund on 09-02-17
By: Mike Davis
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Ramp Hollow
- The Ordeal of Appalachia
- By: Steven Stoll
- Narrated by: Brian Sutherland
- Length: 13 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Appalachia - among the most storied and yet least understood regions in America - has long been associated with poverty and backwardness. But how did this image arise, and what exactly does it mean? In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll launches an original investigation into the history of Appalachia and its place in US history, with a special emphasis on how generations of its inhabitants lived, worked, survived, and depended on natural resources held in common.
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Almost unlistenable
- By Golf Fan on 09-13-18
By: Steven Stoll
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A Little History of the World
- By: E. H. Gombrich
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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E. H. Gombrich's world history, an international best seller now available in English for the first time, is a text dominated not by dates and facts but by the sweep of experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity's achievements, and an acute witness to its frailties.
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an enlightening book; very well read
- By A.B.Oxford on 06-03-06
By: E. H. Gombrich
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Work
- A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots
- By: James Suzman
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 13 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Work defines who we are. It determines our status and dictates how, where, and with whom we spend most of our time. It mediates our self-worth and molds our values. But are we hardwired to work as hard as we do? Did our Stone Age ancestors also live to work and work to live? And what might a world where work plays a far less important role look like? To answer these questions, James Suzman charts a grand history of "work" from the origins of life on Earth to our ever more automated present, challenging some of our deepest assumptions about who we are.
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if you like Jared Diamond's work, you'll like this
- By Mark on 04-09-22
By: James Suzman
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Countdown
- Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?
- By: Alan Weisman
- Narrated by: Adam Grupper
- Length: 18 hrs
- Unabridged
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Weisman visits an extraordinary range of the world's cultures, religions, nationalities, tribes, and political systems to learn what in their beliefs, histories, liturgies, or current circumstances might suggest that sometimes it's in their own best interest to limit their growth.
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Boring
- By NorthFLADiver on 01-14-14
By: Alan Weisman
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Why the West Rules - for Now
- The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future
- By: Ian Morris
- Narrated by: Antony Ferguson
- Length: 24 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Sometime around 1750, English entrepreneurs unleashed the astounding energies of steam and coal, and the world was forever changed. The emergence of factories, railroads, and gunboats propelled the West’s rise to power in the nineteenth century, and the development of computers and nuclear weapons in the 20th century secured its global supremacy.
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Compelling and infuriating take at World History
- By Meyer on 09-11-11
By: Ian Morris
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Age of Discovery
- Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
- By: Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Age of Discovery explores a world on the brink of a new Renaissance and asks: how do we share more widely the benefits of unprecedented progress? How do we endure the inevitable tumult generated by accelerating change? How do we each thrive through this tangled, uncertain time? From gains in health, education, wealth and technology to crises of conflict, disease and mass migration, the similarities between today's world and that of the 15th century are both striking and prophetic: we have been here before.
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A monotonous text disguised as casual reading.
- By Rob on 07-29-16
By: Ian Goldin, and others
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Organic Manifesto
- How Organic Food Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe
- By: Maria Rodale, Eric Scholsser - foreword
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 5 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing on findings from leading health researchers as well as conversations with both chemical and organic farmers from coast to coast, Maria Rodale irrefutably outlines the unacceptably high cost of chemical farming on our health and our environment. She traces the genesis of chemical farming and the rise of the immense companies that profit from it, bringing to light the government's role in allowing such practices to flourish.
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those in power must read and work upon it.
- By Jaktip on 12-20-17
By: Maria Rodale, and others
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The Vertical Farm
- Feeding the World in the 21st Century
- By: Dickson Despommier
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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When Columbia professor Dickson Despommier set out to solve America's food, water, and energy crises, he didn't just think big - he thought up. The vertical farm has excited scientists, architects, and politicians around the globe. These farms, grown inside skyscrapers, would provide solutions to many of the serious problems we currently face.
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Excellent Brainstorming - Not reality
- By Texas Community Project on 01-25-11
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Bad scholarship and bias that overwhelms his facts
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Pass on this one and read The Black Swan
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Worthwhile if you have the patience
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great book
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Still useful today.
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Bad scholarship and bias that overwhelms his facts
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Brilliant!
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Fooled by Randomness
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great book
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Still useful today.
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Two renowned investment advisors and authors of the best seller The Great Reckoning bring to light both currents of disaster and the potential for prosperity and renewal in the face of radical changes in human history as we move into the next century. The Sovereign Individual details strategies necessary for adapting financially to the next phase of Western civilization.
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Unfortunately distopian for mosty of humanity
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This is a must for every Educated Person
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Such a disappointment
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A new virus descended on the human species in 2019 wreaking unprecedented havoc. Nearly two years into the pandemic, the crucial mystery of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is not only unresolved but has deepened. In this uniquely insightful book, a scientist and a writer join forces to try to get to the bottom of how a virus whose closest relations live in bats in subtropical southern China somehow managed to begin spreading among people more than 1,500 kilometers away in the city of Wuhan.
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A pivotal work in search of truth around the Covid19 virus in a world where facts got downgraded in favour of politics
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The Tao of Seneca
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The Tao of Seneca (volumes 1-3) is an introduction to Stoic philosophy through the words of Seneca. If you study Seneca, you'll be in good company. He was popular with the educated elite of the Greco-Roman Empire, but Thomas Jefferson also had Seneca on his bedside table. Thought leaders in Silicon Valley tout the benefits of Stoicism, and NFL management, coaches, and players alike - from teams such as the Patriots and Seahawks - have embraced it.
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Interesting voice actor but
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The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
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Naval Ravikant is an entrepreneur, philosopher, and investor who has captivated the world with his principles for building wealth and creating long-term happiness. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant is a collection of Naval’s wisdom and experience from the last 10 years, shared as a curation of his most insightful interviews and poignant reflections. This isn’t a how-to book, or a step-by-step gimmick. Instead, through Naval’s own words, you will learn how to walk your own unique path toward a happier, wealthier life.
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Narrator sucks
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Great book, awful audio book
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Reality Is Not What It Seems
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From the New York Times best-selling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, and Helgoland, a closer look at the mind-bending nature of the Universe. What are the elementary ingredients of the world? Do time and space exist? And what exactly is reality? Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli has spent his life exploring these questions. He tells us how our understanding of reality has changed over the centuries and how physicists think about the structure of the Universe today.
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Most compelling physics book in at least 10 years!
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Poor Charlie’s Almanack
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"Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up," Charles T. Munger advises in Poor Charlie’s Almanack. Originally published in 2005, this compendium of 11 talks, delivered by the legendary Berkshire Hathaway vice-chairman between 1986 and 2007, has become a touchstone for a generation of investors and entrepreneurs seeking to absorb the enduring wit and wisdom of one of the great minds of the 20th and 21st centuries.
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Multiple mental models & life long learning
- By AusBos on 01-01-24
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Factfulness
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Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of carrying only opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends - what percentage of the world's population live in poverty; why the world's population is increasing; how many girls finish school - we systematically get the answers wrong. In Factfulness, professor of international health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two longtime collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens.
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Great Read not for Listening
- By carlos gomez on 06-01-18
By: Hans Rosling, and others
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The Better Angels of Our Nature
- Why Violence Has Declined
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- Unabridged
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Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence.
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I'd kill for another book this good
- By Eric on 11-11-11
By: Steven Pinker
What listeners say about The Rational Optimist
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- Robert F. Jones
- 09-15-17
Personal
Second time through this book, and even better than the first time I read it. It just all makes so much sense. It was as a result of this book years ago that I generally stopped reading the news and just kept track of general trends. I see examples of pervasive negativity all around me, and as I have assumed more leadership roles it has become obvious that a big part of my job is just putting things into factual historical perspective.
Surprising that this book was written just after the crash of 2008 - lending it even more validity.
One of my top 50 for challenging conventional wisdom and giving me hope.
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25 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Darkcoffee
- 06-09-10
Delightful Case for Things Looking Up
An extended argument that human intelligence and the well-being it allows is created, collected, maintained, distributed and extended by trade. Trade is "ideas having sex." Ridley builds his case with point after point then examines all the usual counterexamples and objections, taking them out one by one. It's a wonderful book. Of course it helped that he was preaching to the choir with me. What's most delightful is Ridley's goodhearted skewering of pessimists -- the technological and environmentalist Jeremiahs in particular -- with the most obvious of weaknesses is their flimsy cases. He's almost embarrassed for them. Ridley is a bit repetitive at times, but maintains a wry humor and lighthearted tone throughout, which makes his writing all the more effective. He's a good writer and he's right about everything.
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19 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Bruce Sharpe
- 07-10-10
Contrarianism, convincingly argued
This book will make you feel more optimistic about the prospects for humankind than you might have thought possible. The author does this, not by ignoring the many very real problems that we face, but by taking a broad historical perspective. His conclusion, which is very convincingly argued: the human condition has improved dramatically by almost any measure and there is every reason to expect it will continue to do so. The reasons why are intriguing and the analysis draws from a broad range of economics, history, science and technology.
I wish my activist friends would read this book and re-assess the focus of their concerns. We all want to make the world a better place and surely the most effective way to do so is to assess, rationally and without ideology or dogma, what has worked in the past as a guide to what might work in the future. It won't be an easy exercise for many because it leads the author takes a contrarian view on many currently fashionable topics including world trade, alternative energy, genetically modified food, global warming, etc.
The author makes a strong case for rationalism and it is a nice, but not inevitable, outcome that rationalism leads to optimism. If that sounds promising to you, you will find plenty of material here to bolster your hopes and inform your views of where we should be going from here.
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13 people found this helpful
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- Gary
- 05-27-12
We've got it good
We really are living in special times. This book with Pinker's "Better Angels of our Nature" show how we are living at a very special time and things will most likely only get better. The book demonstrates how humans became special through our ability to trade with one another. You'll learn about prehistory and how the average person has it better than the Sun King, Louis XIV. After all, we have Novocaine and a seamlessly but complex system of trade which brings food from all over the world to my local table for an incredibly affordable price.
If you can give a person only one gift, let it be the gift of optimism. They will live longer on average and have happier lives. This book will help even the most pessimistic among us become an optimist.
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11 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Tom
- 06-25-10
Brilliant capture of the human experience.
I am listening to this title for the second time back-to-back. First time I've done that in nearly 300 titles purchased.
Matt Ridley has beautifully woven together up-to-date dicoveries and insights in biology, genetics, archeology, and anthropology with economic principles and historical narrative, to form a clear picture of how humanity got to where it is today, and what the future might hold for our species. He does so in an easy to understand flow that offers enough specific detail to make it facinating, without bogging down in technical arcana.
Whether you are trained in any of those foundational dicsiplines or just a curious layman I promise you will find it engrossing, entertaining, and enlightening.
The narrator, L.J. Ganzer, adds to the experience with a very smooth, well inflected delivery.
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11 people found this helpful
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- Joshua Kim
- 06-10-12
Should Be on Your List
This book is almost too perfectly aligned with my core beliefs that the story of the world is one of progress. The mental architecture that I place new learning is built around a narrative of progress. The story is one technology driven change towards lower mortality, lower fertility, better nutrition, and better health. My training in both demography and history has taught me to be weary of any talk of "better days or golden ages" - as I appreciate lower child mortality, the spread of democracy, and expanded access to education.
So Ridley has written the book that conforms to almost all my prior beliefs - although he arrives at his conclusions by routes I probably wouldn't go. First, Ridley is clearly leans libertarian. He is suspicious of the role of government in promoting progress. I'd be interested in how he explains away government led policies that are responsible for so much of the progress we have enjoyed, everything from sewer projects to social security, civil rights legislation to medicare, medicaid, and the recent health care bill. I think Ridley does not give enough credit to the role of organized labor for contributing to spreading the benefits of capitalism to more people, nor does he seem to grasp the importance of government in supporting education at every level.
His dismissal of global warming as a major concern will get lots of attention for being basically wrong-headed, and I'd agree that he oversells his case and therefore gets the actions that we should be taking basically wrong. (My take…worry less, invest prudently).
I like that Ridley comes out as a fan of hydrocarbons and big oil (timely given the BP disaster), and his critique of ethanol is accurate and devastating. But he misses the importance of investing in alternative energy as an engine to insure innovation, seemingly blinded by the idea of a zero sum game of social investments (which is strange as he rails against zero sum thinking). I like a book where I agree with the conclusions but disagree with how the argument is derived. This tells me that the fundamental truth of the progress story is intact - and where we need to argue and debate is around the means rather than the ends.
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- tstone9999
- 01-17-11
A rational response to chicken little
Wow. After listening to this book for a third time in the last year, I decided I needed to write a review.
This book provides a well constructed, reasonable walk through time to give the reader some true perspective about our current condition relative to all those that have come before us.
At a time when media coverage is based around telling us what's wrong with us, our planet and our country, this book provides a practical antidote. Part historical narrative, part social anthropological study and part defense for science, technology and capitalism, this should be required reading for every high school student so they have something to balance their exposure to an almost completely reactionary media without any historical perspective.
It's true, there is a reason to believe mankind has a bright future! Who knew?
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- Mark
- 02-25-16
Exchange is the essence of humanity
This book is arrestingly, surprisingly, refreshingly different to the current tide of thinking about the World and the future, almost to the point of making you feel that it might be heretical to be persuaded by its ideas. I listened to it and felt completely convinced - but I also felt like I ought to consult some other clever person (other than the author, not other than me!) to ask whether it’s OK to believe this book.
Another surprising thing about this work is that it appears to take a totally different direction to other works by the same author (I had to Wiki the name to make sure the author was the same person). I’ve previously read ‘Genome’ and ‘Nature via Nurture’ by Matt Ridley and thoroughly enjoyed the output of this popular science author, but ‘the Rational Optimist’ is utterly different (reminding me of the difference between Dawkins’ ‘Selfish Gene’ and his ‘God Delusion’ in terms of an author of nonfiction radically changing their subject matter). The ‘Rational Optimist’ posits the theory that THE key feature of humanity that has given rise to progress and prosperity is trade and exchange – more than any other thing. Not education, not culture, not government, not science, but the free market – and this going right back to our earliest hunter-gatherer origins.
He presents this argument in a very convincing (and enjoyable) way - so much so, that someone with slight socialist tendencies (like me) fears that he is being suckered into buying into capitalist propaganda! Like someone who reads ‘The Art of the Deal’ by Donald Trump and is seduced by its tub-thumping inanity.
Ridley argues that the ability of man to continue to invent and reinvent and create new ways of growing prosperity continues at such a fantastic – even exponential – rate, that we will easily manage to overcome the challenges of the future, such as climate change and increasing population. In this respect the book is very similar to ‘Abundance’ by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, also a great optimistic - highly recommended - audiobook available from Audible.
On the downside, the narration was a bit disappointing. With most audiobooks you get a bit of inappropriate word emphasis and occasional word mispronunciation (exceptions are audiobooks narrated by their authors), but in this case the incidence of these avoidable, unforced errors was unacceptably high. However, in mitigation, the narrator does have a proper ‘actor’s’ voice with the requisite gravitas to be pleasing on the ear.
Finally, I would say that this is an extremely thought-provoking and interesting book - so good that I’m just about to listen to it for a second time.
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- Lidia Tamara Majerski
- 09-29-12
The Ideological Optimist
What drew me to the book was the premise of the title and an excellent wired article by the author providing a synopsis of the book and my rational, skeptic and optimist mindset. After reading the book in it's entirety I was left feeling cheated and annoyed by the tone of the book.
This book's author does not take a rational dispassionate view. It is skewed heavily into American republican free-market ideology. If you want to have a fun solo drinking game, take a drink every time the following right-wing keywords and phrases pop up: "Government is bad", "taxes are bad", "academics are elitist", "Media is liberal and elitist", "Environmentalists are wackos", "the only answer is a free and unfettered market", "bureaucrats are parasites", "United Nations is bad"...I guarantee that you will have alcohol poisoning before you finish the book.
The central premise of the entire book is that commerce (trade) is the one and only factor in past, present and future human well being and prosperity. This point is drilled into you over the entire book with many examples and facts. Many of them well written and convincing. However, any point to the contrary, any problems raised by trade and capitalism is refereed to in a derisive, condescending manner with few facts and many unsubstantiated arguments.
All of this is a shame because at the core of the book there is what I believe to be a cogent and true statement, that there are many reasons to be optimistic about humanities future. It's just too bad that the idea is not presented in a rational manner.
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- Lucas Moller
- 12-19-17
Glosses over details and cherry picks conclusions
The author often uses anecdotes and opinion to support his conclusion based on rough concepts far from demonstrating proof in the cited research. Often times mutli-faceted complex problems are simplified to a single variable which he glosses over as not fitting the conclusions of other and does then hardly acknowledges any other variable that should be considered against his point. While there is a lesson in his core message the examples he uses throughout the book are poorly presented as absolutisms to explain his optimistic perspective. While the book serves a purpose soley in its existing as a counterpoint to many hyperbolic treatments of today's problems, it's hard to see significant value in his specific arguments. Many of the stated conclusions have on fact had their underlying assumptions changed in the handful of years since publication.
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