Ridley's main idea is that despite the incessant bad news on the economy, environment, disease, we get and wallow in, there are some very good reasons to be more optimistic and more upbeat, that things indeed should get better, and will, despite some bumps, inexorably continue to get better and better. It has plenty of detail, and is heavily footnoted with references. Almost too much detail. I had to start skimming over some of the pre-history and anthropology of human interaction, though it is still very good.
Before book details, I must say that Ridley is controversial. He is an avowed, perhaps extreme, libertarian. His doctorate Oxford is in zoology - he knows his science. The most controversial thing about Ridley is that he was president of the British bank, Northern Rock for several years, and led it to it's infamous insolvency that resulted in the first run on a bank in the western world in decades. The government (which he thinks should be much much smaller) had to bail out NR to the tune of 16 billion pounds to pay depositors their money.
Some key ideas:
The pessimists have always had the loudest voices and the most traction. And they have always been wrong. For example, consider population and food. Robert Malthus (for whom the adjective 'Malthusian' is named) forecast that population growth would outstrip the world's ability to feed it. Paul Erlich (the 1968 bestseller Population Bomb) brought this into the modern age. Both forecasts have proven dramatically wrong. Though the population grew dramatically in the past 200 years, the world's ability to feed it has increased at a greater rate, first through improved farming, second through the ability to mine, then artificially produce nitrogen fertilizers, and most recently through improved genetic modification and vastly more efficient water conservation in agriculture. Erlich maintains the improvements are simply pushing starvation a few years down the road. But population growth rates, once nearly exponential, is now beginning to slow. (______
The "Robber barons" - Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, enriched us by making travel (rail), steel and oil cheaper. (p23)
Human quality of life on average is and (despite some bumps) always has been improving. The best metric of improvement in human existence is time. How much time do you have to work to earn the value of something? ex: Artificial light - One hour of labor in 1800 earns 186 lumen hours of light (tallow candle). in 2009 one hour of work gives 8.4 million lumen hours (CFL). or - 1 hour of labor in 1800 gives 10 minutes of reading light. Today 1 hour = 300 days of light. (p.20)
Exchange is key.
Reciprocity is giving each other the same thing at different times (animals groom each other). Exchange is giving each other different things at the same time. Think barter or trade. Only humans do this. No animals participate in exchange. (p. 57). Humans are the only animals who evolved to trade, but only after population density exceeds some critical number. Higher density = more trade and higher and faster specialization and advancement of civilization. (ch. 2). The density contribution is mentioned in Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From.
"Das Adam Smith Problem." is the apparent contradiction between Smith's two books - The Wealth of Nations, and Theory of Moral Sentiments. One said people have instinctive sympathy and goodness, the other says we are driven by self-interest. In Wealth Smith says that people are driven by self-interest, and in Sentiments, he says people have innate sympathy and good.
"People go beyond friendship and achieve common interest with stranger: they turn strangers into honorary friends... Smith brilliantly confused the distinction between altruism and selfishness: if sympathy allows you to please yourself by pleasing others, are you being selfish or altruistic? As the philosopher Robert Solomon put it, "What I want for myself is your approval, and to get it I will most likely do what you think I should do." (p. 93)Successful transactions work because they benefit both parties (if one party does not benefit, it is exploitation). But natural mistrust (humans see most transactions a zero-sum games) is our perception because that was the environment in which our brains evolved (stone age). The non-zero sum reality works in markets in goods and services; not in speculative financial markets. (p. 101)
Regarding intellectualism and markets, he quotes Australian economist Peter Saunders: "Nobody planned the global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it. This particularly offends intellectuals, for capitalism renders them redundant. It gets on perfectly well without them. Ridley goes on:
"There is nothing new about this. the intelligentsia has disdained commerce throughout Western History. Homer and Isaiah despised traders. St. Paul, St. Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther all considered usury a sin. Shakespeare could not bring himself to make the persecuted Shylock a hero... IN the 1880s Arnold Toynbee, lecturing working men on the English industrial revolution which had so enriched them, castigated free enterprise capitalism as a 'world of gold-seeking animals, stripped of every human affection' and 'less real than the island of Lilliput'.... As the British politician Lord Taverne puts it, speaking of himself: 'a classical education teaches you to despise the wealth is prevents you from earning." (p. 102)"Random violence makes the news precisely because it is so rare; routine kindness does not make the news precisely because it is so commonplace." (p 104)
Milton Friedman - "Business corporations in general are not defenders of free enterprise. On the contrary, they are one of the chief sources of danger. (111)
Two views of farming vs. hunter-gatherers:
pessimist: (Cohen & Sahlins) farming was a 'back breaking treadmill'. Hunter gatherers' life was a life of much lesiure time and egalitarian luxury (Dobe & King ????) (p. 135)
??? the other view???
Malthus lives. [recount the doomsayers and show how they are discredited]. (ch. 4)
Organic food politics is self-contradictory.
p. 247 Jefferson quote - saying
p. 275 (my idea - life & black holes examples of negative entropy)
ch. 8 - "What is the flywheel of the perpetual innovation machine that drives the world?: (p. 254) Review of science, capital, i.p., government, and exchange. Hayek's Catallaxy. The ever expanding possiblity generated by a growing division of labor. (p. 56 - check this???????)
p 276 Paul Rosner - whole page
p. 281 PP PP concession - summarize.
p. 329 Global Warming - Cooling - Climate always changes - we tend to believe that only recent temperatures are 'perfect'.
