The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

by Matt Ridley

At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.

Humanity is experiencing an extraordinary burst of evolutionary change, driven by good old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection. But it is selection among ideas, not among genes.

Exchange is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution. By exchanging, human beings discovered ‘the division of labour’, the specialisation of efforts and talents for mutual gain.

Specialisation encouraged innovation, because it encouraged the investment of time in a tool-making tool. That saved time, and prosperity is simply time saved, which is proportional to the division of labour. The more human beings diversified as consumers and specialised as producers, and the more they then exchanged, the better off they have been, are and will be. And the good news is that there is no inevitable end to this process. The more people are drawn into the global division of labour, the more people can specialise and exchange, the wealthier we will all be.