Skip to main content

The Rational Optimist – Matt Ridley ****

I have a real problem reviewing a book like this. I’m the sort of person who can listen to a speech by practically any non-extremist politician and think ‘Yes, that makes sense.’ I am quite easily swayed by political argument, and in essence, The Rational Optimist isn’t a science book at all, it is a political polemic that happens to be by a science writer. Even so, it’s interesting enough that I feel it is worth covering here.
The majority of Ridley’s book is pointing out that we really have never had it so good. And it’s a very convincing argument indeed. He points out that those people who look back to pre-industrialization with a fake rosy glow of a time when we lived happy lives, better in tune with nature is just rubbish. The fact is, most people scraped a living and had short (at least on average), nasty lives. Ah, someone is bound to pipe up, that’s because agriculture itself was one technology too many. People were better fed and happier when they were hunter gatherer’s.
Ridley pops this bubble very effectively too. It’s true that hunter gatherers were usually much better fed than subsistence farmers. The problem is that hunter gatherers still suffered from all the untreated illnesses. And they needed a phenomenal amount of space per person. To achieve this, they were in a constant state of war with practically everyone else in sight. Most of them would not make old age even if they survived childhood diseases because of being murdered. (In fact it’s true of all our ‘idyllic’ past – homicide rates were much higher than now.)
We have a grim picture of people being forced into dark satanic slums to feed the industrial machine, but as Ridley also points out, most people moved to the slums because they were better than their living conditions in the country. It was horrible, it was rubbish, but it was better rubbish, and a step on the ladder.
The theme throughout the book is one of rational optimism. He argues than many – most? – thinkers through the ages have been pessimists with disaster always around the corner. For thousands of years, the popular stance has been, ‘Yes, it’s okay now, but soon it will all go wrong.’ Ridley suggests that the reason it doesn’t go wrong is that we invent ourselves out of the problem. The reason we won’t run out of energy or food, for example, is we will find ways around it. And he’s right, despite all the gloom and woe-mongers, on the whole we do.
This is not a Panglossian treatise suggesting we have the best of all possible worlds – Ridley accepts we’ve a long way to go – but simply that we have achieved a much better general standard than our forebears, and there is every chance we will continue to do so. The big driving factor, he suggests, is the interbreeding of ideas, fuelled by trade. As long as you try to do everything yourself, you can never progress very far. Self-sufficiency is a dead end. Try making an iPad out of twigs from your allotment. You need to be able to trade with others, to develop specialists and so on to be able to invent your way out of disasters.
Ridley takes on the big problems of Africa and climate change, not necessarily offering total solutions, but pointing out some of the changes that are needed if we are to address these issues more constructively. He has a media image of being a climate change denier. This isn’t quite fair – he does downplay the impact, but also believes we are much better at coping with slow change – which climate change is – than we are generally given credit for. The final section of the book, which attempts a bit of futurology is very weak in comparison with the rest and doesn’t add a lot to the rest.
Overall, then, the message of the book is encouraging and I’m all in favour of it. At times the way Ridley gets that message across is tedious with statistic after statistic being hurled at us in a barrage, but perhaps he feels he needs to do this, so strong is the underlying ethos that the modern world is terrible, rather than the best we’ve achieved to date.
I confess I very much liked what I read. I can’t give this the full five stars as I don’t see why it is being regarded as a popular science book – but it should be required reading for environmentalists, politicians and professional doom mongers.

Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more