It takes the combined knowledge of several generations of humans, and tens of thousands of individuals working in concert to make a plastic shirt button.Ĭertainly, Ridley managed to make the same point with a lot fewer words and with a lot of the same words might I add: individual, thousands, petroleum, plastic, mold, alone, from scratch. How are you as an individual going to mine, smelt, mix and purify metal alloys and then use them to build drilling jigs with carbide or diamond tipped drills to extract the petroleum? How will you make the machine tools used to fabricate the mold used to make that button? How would you manage to turn the raw petroleum into plastic? Truth be told, duplicating from scratch a simple plastic button is a task that is orders of magnitude beyond anything any human being is even remotely capable of doing alone. The machine tools used to make the mold were made of several different metal alloys. The button was formed in a mold that was, in turn, machined from a metal alloy.
The button is probably made out of plastic a polymer created from petroleum pumped from the bowels of the Earth. Before rushing to take up that challenge, consider the following. I challenge any human being on the face of this planet to duplicate from scratch that simple little button without any help from another person. Look at one of the buttons on your shirt. Look at how similar it is to a paragraph in an obscure book called Poison Darts-Protecting the Biodiversity of our World, written six years prior.
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Not one of them alone knows how to make a computer peripheral from scratch. Farmers grew the coffee that shippers transported and was consumed by oil riggers whose petroleum was used by refinery workers to make the plastic that was molded by factory workers for the mouse, which was assembled by other laborers for salespeople to sell to the retailer who sold it to me. The mouse was made by thousands-perhaps millions-of people, each of whom played a small role in realizing the whole. I was taken aback when on page two, just after the photo of a stone tool and a plastic computer mouse, I read the following:
Government protection and high fecundity have helped the species recapture some lost ground, giving researchers reason for guarded optimism. Here, rangers and scientists hope to prevent the first primate extinction in recorded history. By the latest tally, there are only 22 Hainan gibbons-one family with 11 members, another with seven members, and four loners-remaining in their last refuge, Bawangling National Nature Reserve on southern China's Hainan Island. The Hainan gibbon may be the world's most endangered primate. Here's another one that just arrived in the latest issue of Science: Call me a pessimist, but had there been more pessimistic headlines warning of the imminent extinction of the Chinese river dolphin or the ivory-billed woodpecker, would they still be with us? How about the California condor or whooping crane? Oh, wait, they are still with us. He spends an inordinate amount of time complaining about the press's propensity for pessimistic headlines. I was looking forward to this book, which started out good. Africa is following Asia out of poverty the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people's lives as never before.Īn astute, refreshing, and revelatory work that covers the entire sweep of human history-from the Stone Age to the Internet- The Rational Optimist will change your way of thinking about the world for the better.Just how rational are we? Had the optimists not prevailed would the Titanic have sailed? I've read most of Ridley's books and have recently read my favorite, The Red Queen-Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature for the second time. Food availability, income, and life span are up disease, child mortality, and violence are down all across the globe. But in fact, life is getting better-and at an accelerating rate. Fans of the works of Jared Diamond ( Guns, Germs, and Steel), Niall Ferguson ( The Ascent of Money), and Thomas Friedman ( The World Is Flat) will find much to ponder and enjoy in The Rational Optimist.įor two hundred years the pessimists have dominated public discourse, insisting that things will soon be getting much worse. In a bold and provocative interpretation of economic history, Matt Ridley, the New York Times-bestselling author of Genome and The Red Queen, makes the case for an economics of hope, arguing that the benefits of commerce, technology, innovation, and change-what Ridley calls cultural evolution-will inevitably increase human prosperity. “A delightful and fascinating book filled with insight and wit, which will make you think twice and cheer up.” - Steven Pinker
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