The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

by Matt Ridley

It is easier to wax elegiac for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long-drop toilet.

Tomorrow’s largely self-employed workers, clocking on to work online in bursts for different clients when and where it suits them, will surely look back on the days of bosses and foremen, of meetings and appraisals, of time sheets and trade unions, with amusement.

Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away.

The affordability of cloth for the English working class was made possible by the buying and selling of captured Africans.

In the 2000s influenza, too, proved to be a paper tiger.

but Botswana then had a stroke of good fortune in its colonial experience. It was incorporated into the British empire in such a half-hearted and inattentive fashion that it barely experienced colonial rule.