Rational Optimist

How Prosperity Evolves

By: Matt Ridley

Narrated by: L J Ganser

Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

The Samuel Johnson Prize Shortlist Nominees 2011

Over 10,000 years ago, there were fewer than 10 million people on the planet. Today there are more than six billion, and 99 per cent of whom are better fed, better sheltered, better entertained, and better protected against disease than their Stone Age ancestors.

The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going erratically upwards for 10,000 years and has rapidly accelerated over the last 200 years: calories; vitamins; clean water; machines; privacy; the means to travel faster than we can run, and the ability to communicate over longer distances than we can shout. Yet, bizarrely, however much things improve from the way they were before, people still cling to the belief that the future will be nothing but disastrous.

In this original, optimistic book, Matt Ridley puts forward his surprisingly simple answer to how humans progress, arguing that we progress when we trade and we only really trade productively when we trust each other.

The Rational Optimist will do for economics what Genome did for genomics and will show that the answer to our problems, imagined or real, is to keep on doing what we've been doing for 10,000 years – to keep on changing.

©2010 HarperCollins Publishers (P)2010 HarperCollins Publishers

Great book for the pessimists among us

This book is well written and researched. It brings a much needed positivity to a world descended into despair. Share it widely. I would love Matt Ridley to update it for 2024...

Excellent

Good story and narration. challenges one to be optimistic in thinking. nice detailing of history given. loved it.

Such a welcome perspective!

Thoroughly interesting, well researched and intelligently presented perspective. I shall be considering and further studying the information given in this book for a fair while.

If you're pessimistic, this is a required read.

This book is so bloody good I wrote this review. (the first of 73- had to check my stats). 👌

Strong opinions

Strong opinions, some challenging and interesting, some hackneyed and now proven wrong. Overall I feel it was worth listening to.

A tonic for despair at the state of the world

While negativity dominates headlines, the good news of human development over recent decades and centuries is an underlying current that is hard to see if you don’t take the time to look. This book provides a detailed look at what has changed for humans over time. I like how it brought to focus the impact of trade. I would recommend this along with Hans Rosling’s Factfullness (2018) for anyone wanting to explore how the world is getting better.

Breathtakingly Hypocritical

This book was highly recommended by a friend. Despite a persuasive argument, Ridley's book cannot be considered in the absence of context, for Ridley chaired the English bank Northern Rock, a bank which, due to its high-risk lending practices, went to the wall during the GFC with red ink to the tune of twenty-some billion UK pounds, and was subsequently nationalised to prevent a 'run' on the banks and the collapse of the British financial system. Thus, while I'm a conservative who is naturally sceptical of the size and role of government in virtually every economy, I find it extremely ironical that Ridley, at the outset, states that he cannot refer to the collapse of Northern Rock 'for legal reasons' yet it is, in the style of other libertarians such as Ayn Rand, the free market which serves as the bedrock for virtually every subsequent argument. Ridley should have withdrawn the book and rewritten it in the very context of his own aristocratic background (he is now a Viscount!) and on the basis of the events which occurred at the bank of which he was Chair. In addition, I would have thought a UK narrator more preferable to a US narrator given Ridley's own background. With reality incorporated into the narrative rather than rationality, Ridley may have been onto something.