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Un Ottimista Razionale (2010)

by Matt Ridley(Favorite Author)

3.94 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Codice Edizione Torino

review 1: This book is about the evolution of prosperity in human societies through the mechanisms of exchange and specialization. Ridley argues that human beings today are incomparably better off in terms of health and wealth than their ancestors. He sees exchange as a crucial and often ignored part of this process. The exchange of skills and ideas allows people to combine techniques and concepts to create new tools, ideas, and inventions. This process sustains itself as long as exchange is relatively free. People realize that a specialized division of labor allows them to have the benefits of knowing 10, 100, or thousands of skills and ideas while only having to know a small number themselves. Self-sufficiency, for societies and individuals, is actually a trap wherein the demands ... moreof low-tech agriculture simplify the division of labor to the point where inventors, doctors, educators, engineers, and other key specialized professions cannot exist and the struggle for survival dominates. Our prosperity is based on our social connections and openness towards others in a system of enlightened self-interest.One interesting point in this book is Ridley's differentiation between prosperity and inequality. Ridley acknowledges that many societies have become incredibly unequal, including the US. However, this does not mean they have become less prosperous. Ridley sees prosperity as an equation: the number of hours a person must work at society's average wage to purchase the product of the specialized labor of others, whether that product is food, knowledge, a service, or a technology. In this sense, the prosperity of ordinary humans has skyrocketed since the beginning of industrialization and industrial agriculture. Just one example: To purchase one hour of reading light in the late 19th century, an ordinary laborer had to work for close to an hour. That rate steadily decreased, but it was still as high as 5 minutes in the 1950's. The development of better light bulbs, better methods of producing electricity, and the slow rise of the average wage has lowered that cost to a matter of seconds. The same basic dynamic goes for a myriad of technologies, goods, and services. Technology and specialization have benefitted everyone, even if the specifically monetary rewards have not been distributed evenlyI agree with Ridley's main argument here even though I don't share his affection for unregulated capitalism. He has a knee-jerk disdain for government regulation and reform, which has been a crucial part of the evolution and social broadening of prosperity. He does a good job explaining the underlying processes that make capitalism effective, but he goes too far in his faith that these processes will not produce abuses and do not require some regulation to create a balance between generating wealth and protecting human rights.Ridley is correct, however, to point out that optimistic arguments are often dismissed as lofty and unrealistic, while pessimists are more often treated as intellectually serious and prescient. One of his key points is that optimistic assessments of various metrics of quality of life in the 20th century (health, prosperity, violence, development, natural resources) were far closer to the truth than pessimistic ones. He notes that one of the tricks of pessimists is that they have made dire projections about the future of let's say food availability based on the assumption that technology will remain stagnant. People in the 60's and 70's who predicted massive famines because of the vastly expanding world population ignored incredible developments in fertilizers, new genetically enhanced or cross-bred crops, and the fact that people have fewer kids when they become more prosperous. Societies that continue to innovate and allow open exchanges of ideas should be able to solve seemingly dire problems in the future, as we have more or less done up to this point.Ridley ends with a compelling moral case for optimism. He is not a Whig who merely has faith in progress; rather, he sees it and shows it empirically in the world around him. He sees pessimism as a self-fulfilling prophecy and a knee-jerk reaction among people trying to hedge their bets in order to look smart. Over and over again, it has the optimists who have been proven right, not least by their willingness to work for solutions rather than despair. He also shows that pessimists have often come up with deeply inhumane solutions to problems they exaggerated or predicted to be unsolvable. For instance, "Lifeboat ethicists" in the mid-20th century thought population increase and resulting starvation was going to be so bad that working to develop new crops and methods to feed those people was futile and harmful. In reality, those new crops and methods helped stave off those famines and freed up people from agricultural subsistence labor to pursue more profitable careers. He duly warns that solutions to global warming and other pressing issues should not be "suicide for fear of death" by killing the system of exchange and specialization that has gotten us this far.Ridley goes after orthodoxies on both sides of the political spectrum in a convincing and fair-minded way. This book is nowhere near as compelling as Pinker's "Better Angels of our Nature," but it provides an interesting complementary case for empirical optimism alongside Pinker. Once you've all read Pinker **shakes fist,** I strongly recommend following up with the Rational Optimist. Oh yeah, and another thing. Ridley's book is not directly about people becoming happier, which he does not equate with prosperity. I'm sure post-modernists and others will say that the growth of prosperity is a hollow, capitalistic, aimless, materialistic thing to celebrate. However, is it that unreasonable to assume that today's average human, who enjoys unprecedented health, longevity, convenience, technology, comfort, and peace largely because of the dynamics described in this book is not happier than her ancestors who enjoyed none of these things? Could not the evolution of prosperity be a pretty big prerequisite for anyone except the super-elite to be happy? Modern humans may suffer from existential angst, but that's a heck of a lot better than smallpox, a 40 year lifespan, daily heavy labor, illiteracy, no electricity, dentistry, etc. etc. etc. A more sensible view is that human happiness is an incredibly complex riddle that cannot be solved by prosperity alone, but that we should not look askance at prosperity and its underlying causes just because it hasn't solved all problems. Part of Ridley's argument is that we just don't, maybe can't, appreciate what we have.
review 2: It is a simplistic book which talks about the evolution of human progress. There is a lot more to be optimistic about in this world than a few decades ago. Sadly, I could not get through this book because it is a hotch-potch of ideas ideally meant for readers of non-fiction, where the author's pronouncements are more superficial even though they may make sense. It's a good book - but I am bad reader of such books ;) less

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