The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley, 2010 - Pessimism sells. You only have to look at the bookshelves of popular bookstores or look at some market pundits who are one-note sambas or read the news. There is something inherent in the way we are wired that romanticises fear and doom, like chicken little. Matt Ridley takes an opposing stance to this and addresses a lot of gloom, from global warming to African poverty and goes back in history and looks at gloom from the past in terms of acid rain, malthusian traps, famine and disease and how most of them proved to be statistically insignant or how human beings have overcome them when they were real problems - like feeding 9 billion, releasing of slaves etc.
I must give it to the author for backing up all of his optimism with research and numbers, news snippets from different points in history and not getting sucked into tedious economic theory. The argument of the book is that human beings are exceptional in finding solutions, as long as they are incentivised to. They don’t need subsidies to invent, as long as they are allowed to monetise their inventions in a free market. The book is a sort of an ode to capitalism and the evolution of human spirit - both at once, sort of an Adam Smith meets Charles Darwin.
The problems with the book I had arise in the last part where the author gets a bit carried away in the overall picture and generality, sometimes ignoring the specifics of trouble - when you name your book ‘the rational optimist’, you have labelled yourself to be one and that leaves no space for a counterpoint and the biases show where the rationality takes a back seat and author becomes ‘the unbridled optimist’. Still, nothing wrong with this as being optimistic isn’t something that is appreciated easily. 9/10