This blog, The Rational Optimist, is by Matt Ridley, a British author with an impressive résumé.
Matt Ridley is the author of provocative books on evolution, genetics and society. His books have sold over a million copies, been translated into thirty languages, and have won several awards.
I have just read his post, "China's one-child policy was inspired by western greens". It's a wonderful tale about how naive faith in computer modeling and the hubris of a superior ideology changed the course of a nation's future, while creating misery and horror among the population, and finally ending with a future unlike the salvation that was expected.
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
Published: May 2010
Book Review:
A counterblast to the prevailing pessimism of our age, and proves, however much we like to think to the contrary, that things are getting better.
A counterblast to the prevailing pessimism of our age, and proves, however much we like to think to the contrary, that things are getting better.
Over 10,000 years ago there were fewer than 10 million people on the planet. Today there are more than 6 billion, 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.
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