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How Prosperity Evolves
HarperCollins
May 2010
On Sale: May 18, 2010
448 pages
ISBN: 006145205X
EAN: 9780061452055
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Life is getting better—and at an accelerating rate. Food
availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child
mortality, and violence are down — all across the globe.
Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and
luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is
slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the
Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are
enriching people’s lives as never before. The pessimists who
dominate public discourse insist that we will soon reach a
turning point and things will start to get worse. But they
have been saying this for two hundred years. Yet
Matt Ridley does more than describe how things are getting
better. He explains why. Prosperity comes from everybody
working for everybody else. The habit of exchange and
specialization—which started more than 100,000 years ago—has
created a collective brain that sets human living standards
on a rising trend. The mutual dependence, trust, and sharing
that result are causes for hope, not despair. This
bold book covers the entire sweep of human history, from the
Stone Age to the Internet, from the stagnation of the Ming
empire to the invention of the steam engine, from the
population explosion to the likely consequences of climate
change. It ends with a confident assertion that thanks to
the ceaseless capacity of the human race for innovative
change, and despite inevitable disasters along the way, the
twenty-first century will see both human prosperity and
natural biodiversity enhanced. Acute, refreshing, and
revelatory, The Rational Optimist will change your
way of thinking about the world for the better.
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