I haven't read Matt I haven't read Ridley's other books though his Genome book has been in my radar for a while. Picked up his 2011 book "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves", on a whim. While browsing shelves in a book store, this title attracted my attention. He does a nice job of building up his argument to leave us feeling pretty optimistic about the rest of our lives.
His main thesis is that contrary to what the media and conventional wisdom will have you believe, we are not nearing a tipping point after which the civilization as we know is going to collapse. This is applicable to famines, population explosion, wars, global warming, lack of fossil fuels and so on. He argues that human beings have mastered trade and it distinguishes us from the rest of the species on this planet and it is our path to salvation, quoting economist Herb Gintis who ran the Ultimatum Game among different tribes and said, "Societies that use markets extensively develop a culture of co-operation, fairness and respect for the individual".
First chapter of the book titled "A Better Today: The Unprecedented Present", does a wonderful job of running through a large number of the facets of life showing how things have improved over time. He first starts off with a family living in medieval times that people often claimed lived a simple easy life and points out how absurd that concept is since they struggled just to get enough food to survive, which may be contaminated in all sorts of way, suffered from diseases, died young, fought the elements, had to be worried about rulers, neighbors, wild animals and so forth. He then goes on to argue that every aspects of the human life we can examine ranging from deceases, income, inequality, length of life span, range of products available, travel, to more egalitarian social structures, the needle has been moving in the right direction quite fast in the past century or two. He acknowledges the growth of income inequality in the last couple of decades in countries like US and UK. But brushes them aside saying if you consider the entire world trends rather than individual pockets, still the direction is positive. He does concede that changes may not be uniform and steady allover the world but is consistently positive when we look at the long term trends.
I have heard of a study describing how much light one can buy for average wage for an hour worth of work. Since light can be considered a luxury than a necessity like food for living, this is an interesting measure. He discusses this study in detail. In monetary terms, artificial light used to cost 20,000 time in 1300AD England compared to today! If we go even further back, in 1750BC an hour's labor could have bought 24 lumen hours (sesame oil lamp) compared to 186 lumen hours in 1800AD (tallow candle), 4,400 in 1880 (kerosene lamp), 531,000 in 1950 (incandescent light bulbs) and 8.4 million today (compact fluorescent bulb)! In other words, an hour of work today earns us 300 days worth of reading light while even couple of hundred years back in 1800AD it would have got us only 10 minutes! Just one measure of the age of abundance we live in. He then points out as to how the Louis XIV at Versailles in 1700 ate dinner each night alone, choosing from among 40 dishes prepared by some 498 people served in gold and silver plates. This may sound like an extraordinary amount of wealth (that was made possible by keeping the 498 servants and many more in poverty) not available to us in our wildest imagination. But if we really think through, a working mom on her way home can go to the grocery store and pick the dinner she wants for her family choosing from much more than 40 choices. Chances of contamination are also lot less than what the kings in those days had to put up with. Certainly, those aisles and aisles of offerings in the super market are not exclusively for us. But what difference does that make? In the author's point of view all this became possible because we learned to accumulate our knowledge, specialize in what we do best and trade our goods and services. Even if one side benefits much more than the other side in a transaction, it didn't matter since both sides are better off in the end than trying to be totally self-sufficient.
After a very good start, book becomes a drag in the middle where author is discussing the manufacture of virtue in the 50,00 years of human history, farming 10,000 years ago, and the triumph of the cities 5,000 years ago. Though the historical connotation is important to this thesis, the narrative really gets boring to be picked up again on the last 1/3rd of the book. He points out repeatedly as to how environmental & charity organizations along with the media have an inbuilt need to highlight bad news to keep people engaged and to get the societies and the governments to keep them well funded. If news and research reports are positive, no one is going to watch the TV or make donations to organizations. There are lots of discussions about lying through or cherry picking statistics to present dire/bleak pictures.
My notion that typical (but certainly not all) American authors don't know and don't bother to learn much about that one third world country over there full of Hindis who speak Hindoo :-), got a bit of reinforcement from the other direction in this book. Ridley, who is a British author, had even more to say about India compared to China. Beyond the discussions related to Mohenjo Daro & Harappan (today's Pakistan region) civilizations, he also used India (and Africa) in examples explaining how without central Governmental control and guidance, people will adopt latest technologies they find useful to make their lives better. In early 1997 economist Robert Jensen documented how fishermen in Kerala, a Southern coastal state in India, struggled to sell their sardine catch each day as they had no idea which town in the 20 mile coastal stretch had the demand. Later that same year with the advent of mobile phones, as they were sailing their boats back to the coast, they started making phone calls to various coastal markets and landed in the one that offered the maximum price for their catch. Apparently the result was that the fishermen's profits increased by 8 percent while simultaneously the sardine prices to the consumer fell by 4 percent and reduced the wastage from more than 5 percent to practically zero!
He argues that even the two biggest areas garnering pessimism in the last two decades, development of Africa and global warming are not well founded in reality but is based on selected statistics and anecdotal evidence. I won't go as far as he recommends in getting rid of government regulations and supporting unfettered trade everywhere since anything pushed to an extreme doesn't work well and some level of moderation is needed. For example, Somalia has negligible governmental regulation compared to US but can't be held high as the model to follow. But I certainly subscribe to his ideas such as all the dire models talking about us running out of fossil fuels or population explosion collapsing our civilization, presume no technological change or course correction anywhere even in future, which when added to the models may show that the future may not look so bleak.
Decent read, if you can slog, skim or skip through the middle chapters. Bill Gates, who disagrees with Riddley in very similar ways as I do, has posted a nice balanced review of this book on his blog site that is worth reading. Let me know what you are reading. If you are receiving this mail, you owe me at least one email a year. :-)
-sundar.
