Book Reviews

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

Matt Ridley
New York: Harper, 2010, 448 pp.
Science writer Matt Ridley is, as the title of his new book suggests,
optimistic about humanitys futureand not just at the prospect of
even better lives for those lucky enough to have excellent lives
already, but at the possibility of radically transforming, for the better,
the lives of those today suffering near the bottom. The key, he thinks,
is economic growth, that boogeyman of naysayers and concerned citizens everywhere. It is precisely because there is still so much further to go that those who offer counsels of despair or calls to slow
down in the face of looming environmental disaster may be not only
factually but morally wrong, he argues. The path to that better
world 100 years from now will not be smooth. Mankind is likely to
experience traumas both of a natural sort and of its own creation.
Most troubling, The wrong kind of chiefs, priests and thieves could
yet snuff out future prosperity on earth. Ridley doesnt let this possibility get him down. Humans are too driven to trade, exchange
their ideas, and imagine new ones for a few bad apples to ruin the
future.
Ridley arrives at the optimism on display in The Rational
Optimist by answering, with vast historical scope, the crucial question Why are people rich? Libertarians have long understood that
the more common query Why are people poor? misses the point.
Poverty grips humanity by default, just as it grips all species.
Ridleys story of mans ascent hits the high notes of history,
moments often overshadowed by clashing states and conflicting
ideas. At the core of his story sits the colorful metaphor of ideas
having sex. Just as ideas may fight, they may also fall in love. The
offspring of these unions are central both to understanding our past
and guiding the way to an even better future. Where the book
stumblesits argument for trades creation of the human mind
and a muddy distinction between mere pessimism and genuine
cause for concernit finds its feet again quickly. At a time when
the world seems to offer little to be optimistic about, Ridley provides a necessary and welcome reminder that our lot has been
much worse. Today is stupendously good by historical standards,
and things are only going to get better.
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The books scope is huge. In the last chapter, however, Ridley

admirably gets the essence of The Rational Optimist into three sentences:
In this book I have tried to build on both Adam Smith and
Charles Darwin: to interpret human society as the product of
a long history of what the philosopher Dan Dennett calls
bubble-up evolution through natural selection among cultural rather than genetic variations, and as an emergent order
generated by an invisible hand of individual transactions, not
the product of a top-down determinism. I have tried to show
that, just as sex made biological evolution cumulative, so
exchange made cultural evolution cumulative and intelligence collective, and that there is therefore an inexorable
tide in the affairs of men and women discernible beneath the
chaos of their actions. A flood tide, not an ebb tide.

The Rational Optimist begins with a long chapter that, while making arguments familiar to readers of Johan Norberg or Julian Simon,
is a valuable and rhetorically elegant bashing of the notion that the
world is terrible and getting worse. Much is quite broad: The
United Nations estimates that poverty was reduced more in the last
50 years than in the previous 500. Much is charmingly anecdotal.
Ridley tells of the artist Thomas Thawaites who, in 2009, set out to
make his own toaster, of the sort he could buy from a shop for about
4. It took months, cost a lot of money and resulted in an inferior
product. Ridley skewers those who would rather have lived in some
supposedly more delightful past age, saying we need only remind
them of the toilet facilities of the Pleistocene, the transport options
of Roman emperors or the lice of Versailles.
The cause for mans successand Ridleys resulting optimism
is simple economics. The cumulative accretion of knowledge by
specialists that allows us each to consume more and more different
things by each producing fewer and fewer is, I submit, the central
story of humanity. Unfortunately, it is when Ridley attempts to tie
specialization of labor and comparative advantage to the very roots of
humanity that he flies (temporarily) from the rails.
He begins with two questions: If prosperity is exchange and specializationmore like the multiplication of labor than the division of
laborthen when and how did that habit begin? Why is it such a
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peculiar attribute of the human species? The Rational Optimist

admirably answers the first. It is much less successful on the second.
The science writer in Ridley takes over and forces an argument
that ends up circular and unconvincing. He tells us that humans are
the only animals to trade and also that trade drove our evolution
toward what we think of as human. He appears to dismiss the idea
that both being human and trade share a common cause. Instead,
he insists, the latter caused the former.
Ridley tells us that only humans barter. He doesnt tell us why and
he doesnt successfully link bartering to an evolutionary story. He dismisses the two main arguments offered by anthropologists to
explain the appearance in Africa of these new technologies and people.
First, anthropologists point to Africas variable climate, which
pushed natural selection toward adaptable brains. But, Ridley says,
the African climate has always been volatile. So why did trade take so
long to evolve? Also, climate variability applies to lots of other
African species too: if human beings, why not elephants and hyenas? The second theory is that humans got lucky, experiencing a
beneficial genetic mutation that changed our brains and made us
fully capable of imagination, planning, or some other higher function for the first time. Yet, Ridley says, we have evidence that
Neanderthals imagined and planned and spokeand they failed to
show the cultural progress of homo sapiens. These explanations, he
argues, get it backwards. The cultural horse comes before the
genetic cart, Ridley writes. New behaviors drive selection for new
characteristics. The theories are, therefore, a top-down explanation
for a bottom-up process.
The new behavior the anthropologists are trying to explain is economics. The question is how specialization and trade arose in the first
place. Ridley, by rejecting the two main explanations for the rise of
economic activity, is left asserting that the cause of economic behavior is economics. When pressed on how our hominid ancestors made
this leap to homo economicus, his answer is that perhaps it has
something to do with cooking, which encourages specialization by
sex. However, this takes us right back to the beginningto questions of climate and mutation. We are left asking, How did humans
come to possess fire? Once trade happened, it proved hugely advantageous and quickly became a driver of selectionand thus human
evolution. But how trade happened that first timewhether it was
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genetic or memeticis left unanswered, as is why trade is unique to

humans. Fundamentally, he writes, other animals do not do
barter. He adds, I still dont quite know why.
Chapters 3 through 8 are Ridleys historical narrative. He traces
trade and its impact on humanity from the beginning of civilization
through the invention of farming, the rise of cities, the discovery of
fossil fuels, the industrial revolution, and the Information Age. Along
the way, he maintains his focus on the central theme: that trade led
to specialization which led to increased knowledge and, thus, to technological growth, better living standards, and, eventually, a shrinking
human environmental footprint. At every step, humanitys progress
was plagued by chiefs, priests, and thieves, those officious state
agents, pious pessimists, and fraudulent criminals who saw human
progress as a threat to their power or a source for unearned riches.
These chapters are a pleasure to read, but they are not the portions
of The Rational Optimist that will draw the ire of those inclined to
disagree with Ridleys soft libertarian take on humanitys past and
future.
If you say the world has been getting better you may get away
with being called nave and insensitive, Ridley writes at the start of
chapter 9. If you say the world is going to go on getting better, you
are considered embarrassingly mad. Pessimism is, and always has
been, fashionable and Ridley is acutely aware of how much his optimism places him among the uncouth. In this chapter, he shows how
the pessimists, not the optimists, are closer to being embarrassingly
mad. He looks at scares surrounding cancer, nuclear Armageddon,
famine, dwindling natural resources, air pollution, genetic engineering, and plague and, with an arched eyebrow, asks what became of
each. Cancer incidence and death rate from cancer fell . . . by 16
percent between 1950 and 1997. The Cold War failed to end with
the earth a radioactive cinder. Paul Ehrlichs Population Bomb made
for good science fiction but poor prophecy. Ehrlich lost his famous
bet with Julian Simon when the price of natural resources declined.
The air is cleaner and there was no great forest die-off due to acid
rain. Genetic engineering increased crop production and promises
to cure horrific diseases. While we wait for that to happen, modern
diseases have actually evolved away from virulence. The plagues of
the future will continue to look like the overblown bird and swine flu
and not like the H1N1 responsible for 50 million deaths in 1918.

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It would be easy to get the impression Ridley is Pollyannaish. If

nuclear annihilation, super flus, and starvation are nothing to be worried about, what possibly could be? Unfortunately, Ridleys response
to this critique is less convincing than it could be, for he fails to adequately draw a line between when an anticipated disaster is real and
when its just pessimism writ large. Should you ever listen to pessimists? he asks. In the case of the ozone layer, a briefly fashionable
scare of the early 1990s, the human race probably did itself and its
environment a favour by banning chlorofluorocarbons. Acid rain
wasnt a problem, and so we shouldnt have worried about it (or,
rather, shouldnt have taken expensive steps to correct it). Ozone
depletion was a problem, justifying preventative action and, besides,
the costs to human welfare [of that action], though not negligible,
were small. Ridleys rubric states that, if the problem is real and the
costs of fixing it are small, wed be doing ourselves a favor by addressing it. If the problem isnt real and the costs of fixing it are large, we
should let our optimism override our pessimism and count on
exchange to its continue progress. How do we know when a problem
is genuine? How do we know what the cost of fixing it will be? Ridley
doesnt tell us.
Even if Ridley addressed these two concerns, the pessimistic
reader would still see The Rational Optimists historical romp
through the benefits of free exchange/trade as but a side note to the
real problems that should surely smother Ridleys optimism. Yes,
mankind saw improvements since our days of running from lions
across the savannah or hiding in caves from belligerent peers. Yes,
much of that progress resulted from the technological and cultural
progress brought about by ideas having sex. But, surely, if we dont
do something about global warmingsomething that demands dramatically scaling back the consumption fueling so much of our economic growthit will all come to naught. And, the pessimists say,
Ridleys memetic copulation did nothing for the people of Africa,
whose lives all too often remain, in Hobbess famous phrase, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short.
Ridley pounces on these clarions of despondency in his penultimate chapter. He does not dismiss the concernsfor such a person
as your author, African poverty and rapid global warming are indeed
acute challengesbut carefully argues that by far the most likely
outcome of the next nine decades is both that Africa gets rich and
that no catastrophic climate change happens. Institutions matter,
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and what Africa needs is not more top-down foreign aid but legal
support for the bottom-up forces that already exist. It is not as if
Africa needs to invent enterprises: the streets of Africas cities are
teeming with entrepreneurs, adept at doing deals, but they cannot
grow their businesses because of blockages in the system. He is particularly enthusiastic about the exploding use of mobile phones,
which allow producers and merchants to better interface with markets, getting more goods into more hands at lower prices. His prescription for solving the African problem is simply to reproduce there
what has worked elsewhere. The key policies for Africa, Ridley
writes, are to abolish Europes and Americas farm subsidies, quotas
and import tariffs, formalise and simplify the laws that govern business, undermine tyrants and above all encourage the growth of freetrading cities. No small order, but a practical enough plan to at least
partially let the wind out of the pessimists sails.
About climate change, he is equally upbeat. Ridley touches upon
the evidence that the mainstream science of global warming is
flawed and that past catastrophic predictions about the state of the
earths atmosphere (global cooling, acid rain) turn out to be wholly
uncatastrophic, after all. Yet the bulk of Ridleys climate change optimism comes from accepting the consensus predictionthe IPCCs
assertion that the earth will warm during this century around 3C
and inspecting the likely effects. Unlike Al Gore, Ridley does not
see a whole lot to worry about. A warmer climate proves salubrious
for plants, meaning more food for us. It also would reduce the number of deaths each year from weather. But a hotter climate probably
wont happen anyway, Ridley argues, as we will invent new and
cleaner energy production technologies long before the earth warms
beyond a point we can enjoy. He concludes that you cannot on the
IPCCs figures make it anything other than very probable that the
world will be a better place in 2100 than it is today.
Exchange is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution,
Ridley writes in his prologue. What The Rational Optimist makes
clear, in perspicuous prose and enchanting storytelling, is that, just as
biological evolution populated the world with the wondrous variety
of life, exchange allowed one of those species to achieve a wondrous
standard of living that will only improve and become more uniform
as we trade and invent.
Aaron Ross Powell
Cato Institute
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