Bad news is piling up, but is the world actually getting better? *The Rational Optimist* reveals the truth about human prosperity

What we’ll cover this time

Do you scroll through the news on your phone every day and feel like the world is about to end? In *The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves* (written by Matt Ridley), I use icy-cold data and hard-nosed logic to beat pessimism senseless, showing that human society has a very good chance of continuing to improve. The world today is far better than it was in the past—and tomorrow can be better still!

Highlights:

— Busting the fantasy of the good old days: in 1800, “country life” actually meant smoke and coughs, tooth-pulling without anesthetic, and half of all children dying before adulthood

— Self-sufficiency = poverty: it took one person nine months and $1,600 to make a bread machine that still didn’t work; exchange and the collective brain are the real sources of shared abundance

— Exchange as “conceptual sex”: how the “mating” of goods and ideas, much like biological evolution, gives birth to explosive innovations such as cars, steam engines, and microchips

— The commercial creation of virtue: the more self-centered a primitive self-sufficient tribe is, the more compassionate a highly commercial society becomes—and finally, a natural experiment turns everything upside down

Jump to a section

• 00:00 Is the world getting better or worse? The blogger’s long-term rational optimism
• 02:57 Scene 1: Busting the “good old days” fantasy—the real hardships of farming families in 1800
• 08:30 The true measure of prosperity: time! (Human-made light, from 5 hours of labor to 0.5 seconds)
• 09:51 Scene 2: Self-sufficiency is poverty—the bread-machine experiment
• 13:24 Scene 3: The collective brain—exchange lets ideas “mate” and innovation explode
• 18:55 Scene 4: How trade gave birth to agriculture and cities, and put the brakes on empire-building
• 21:20 Scene 5: How did commerce “manufacture” trust and virtue? The final natural experiment
• 24:55 Scene 6: Dissecting pessimism—why are predictions of the end times always wrong?
• 28:40 Three stubborn biases: the truth about fossil fuels, agriculture, climate, and AI
• 32:40 Closing: Embrace the order of exchange and become a brave rational optimist

About the book

• Title: *The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves*
• Author: (British) Matt Ridley
• Publisher: Machinery Industry Press
• Publication date: 2015-07
• ISBN：9780061452055