The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
In truth, far from being unsustainable, the interdependence of the world through trade is the very thing that makes modern life as sustainable as it is.
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
This is history’s greatest theme: the metastasis of exchange, specialisation and the invention it has called forth, the ‘creation’ of time.
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
Getting richer is not the only or even the best way of getting happier. Social and political liberation is far more effective, says the political scientist Ronald Ingleheart: the big gains in happiness come from living in a society that frees you to make choices about your lifestyle – about where to live, who to marry, how to express your sexuality... See more
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
If Cornelius Vanderbilt or Henry Ford not only moves you faster to where you want to go, but requires you to work fewer hours to earn the ticket price, then he has enriched you by granting you a dollop of free time.
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
It was not something that happened within a brain. It was some thing that happened between brains. It was a collective phenomenon.
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
No single person knows how to make a computer mouse. The person who assembled it in the factory did not know how to drill the oil well from which the plastic came, or vice versa. At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
The average South Korean lives twenty-six more years and earns fifteen times as much income each year as he did in 1955 (and earns fifteen times as much as his North Korean counter part).
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
If economic growth does not produce happiness, said the new wisdom, then there was no point in striving for prosperity and the world economy should be brought to a soft landing at a reasonable level of income. Or, as one economist put it: ‘The hippies were right all along’.
Matt Ridley • The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
There are people today who think life was better in the past. They argue that there was not only a simplicity, tranquillity, sociability and spirituality about life in the distant past that has been lost, but a virtue too. This rose-tinted nostalgia, please note, is generally confined to the wealthy.