The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

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Matt Ridley. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

The Rational Optimist. How Prosperity Evolves. Matt Ridley

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE When ideas have sex

Mating minds

CHAPTER 1 A better today: the unprecedented present

Affluence for all

Cheap light

Saving time

Happiness

Crunch

The declaration of interdependence

The multiplication of labour

Self-sufficiency is poverty

Arcadia redux

The call of the new

CHAPTER 2 The collective brain: exchange and specialisation after 200,000 years ago

Homo dynamicus

Starting to barter

Hunting for gathering

Beachcombing east

Shall we trade?

Ricardo’s magic trick

Innovation networks

Networking in the near-east

CHAPTER 3 The manufacture of virtue: barter, trust and rules after 50,000 years ago

Finding a trade buddy

The trust juice

The shadow of the future

If trust makes markets work, can markets generate trust?

Coercion is the opposite of freedom

The corporate monster

Commerce and creativity

Rules and tools

CHAPTER 4 The feeding of the nine billion: farming after 10,000 years ago

No farming without trade

Capital and metal

Ignoble savage?

The fertiliser revolution

Borlaug’s genes

Intensive farming saves nature

Organic’s wrong call

The many ways of modifying genes

CHAPTER 5 The triumph of cities: trade after 5,000 years ago

The ur-city

Cotton and fish

The flag follows trade

The maritime revolution

The virtue of fragmented government

From Ganges to Tiber

Ships of the desert

The merchant of Pisa

The Moloch state

Repeal the corn laws again

The apotheosis of the city

CHAPTER 6 Escaping Malthus’s trap: population after 1200

The medieval collapse

The industrious revolution

British exceptionalism

The demographic transition

An unexplained phenomenon

CHAPTER 7 The release of slaves: energy after 1700

Wealthier yet and wealthier

The metal Midlands

Demand it and they will supply

King coal

Dynamo

Heat is work and work is heat

The mad world of biofuels

Efficiency and demand

CHAPTER 8 The invention of invention: increasing returns after 1800

Innovation is like a bush fire

Driven by science?

Capital?

Intellectual property?

Government?

Exchange!

Infinite possibility

CHAPTER 9 Turning points: pessimism after 1900

A brief history of bad news

Turning-point-itis

Worse and worse

Cancer

Nuclear Armageddon

Famine

Resources

Clean air

Genes

Plague

Sounding the retreat

CHAPTER 10 The two great pessimisms of today: Africa and climate after 2010

Africa’s bottom billion

Aid’s test

Bound to fail?

The world is your oyster

Climate

Warmer and richer or cooler and poorer?

Saving ecosystems

Decarbonising the economy

CHAPTER 11 The catallaxy: rational optimism about 2100

Onward and upward

How good could it get?

NOTES AND REFERENCES

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

INDEX

Acknowledgements

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

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For Matthew and Iris

ADAM SMITH

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But there is nothing unnatural about this. In fact, it is a very typical human pattern. By the age of 15 chimpanzees have produced about 40 per cent and consumed about 40 per cent of the calories they will need during their entire lives. By the same age, human hunter-gatherers have consumed about 20 per cent of their lifetime calories, but produced just 4 per cent. More than any other animal, human beings borrow against their future capabilities by depending on others in their early years. A big reason for this is that hunter-gatherers have always specialised in foods that need extraction and processing – roots that need to be dug and cooked, clams that need to be opened, nuts that need to be cracked, carcasses that need to be butchered – whereas chimpanzees eat things that simply need to be found and gathered, like fruit or termites. Learning to do this extraction and processing takes time, practice and a big brain, but once a human being has learnt, he or she can produce a huge surplus of calories to share with the children. Intriguingly, this pattern of production over the lifespan in hunter-gatherers is more like the modern Western lifestyle than it is like the farming, feudal or early industrial lifestyles. That is to say, the notion of children taking twenty years even to start to bring in more than they consume, and then having forty years of very high productivity, is common to hunter-gatherers and modern societies, but was less true in the period in between, when children could and did go to work to support their own consumption.

The difference today is that intergenerational transfers take a more collective form – income tax on all productive people in their prime pays for education for all, for example. In that sense, the economy (like a chain letter, but unlike a shark, actually) must keep moving forward or it collapses. The banking system makes it possible for people to borrow and consume when they are young and to save and lend when they are old, smoothing their family living standards over the decades. Posterity can pay for its ancestors’ lives because posterity can be richer through innovation. If somebody somewhere takes out a mortgage, which he will repay in three decades’ time, to invest in a business that invents a gadget that saves his customers time, then that money, brought forward from the future, will enrich both him and those customers to the point where the loan can be repaid to posterity. That is growth. If, on the other hand, somebody takes out a loan just to support his luxury lifestyle, or to speculate on asset markets by buying a second home, then posterity will be the loser. That is what, it is now clear, far too many people and businesses did in the 2000s – they borrowed more from posterity than their innovation rate would support. They misallocated the resources to unproductive ends. Most past bursts of human prosperity have come to naught because they allocated too little money to innovation and too much to asset price inflation or to war, corruption, luxury and theft.

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