The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

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

in social evolution the decisive factor is ‘selection by imitation of successful institutions and habits’.

‘To create is to recombine’ said the molecular biologist François Jacob.

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.

This is what prosperity is: the increase in the amount of goods or services you can earn with the same amount of work.

people are programmed to desire, not to appreciate.

Social and political liberation is far more effective, says the political scientist Ronald Ingleheart: the big gains in happiness come from living in a society that frees you to make choices about your lifestyle – about where to live, who to marry, how to express your sexuality and so on. It is the increase in free choice since 1981 that has been responsible for the increase in happiness recorded since then in forty-five out of fifty-two countries. Ruut Veenhoven finds that ‘the more individualized the nation, the more citizens enjoy their life.’

Posterity can pay for its ancestors’ lives because posterity can be richer through innovation.

So long as somebody allocates sufficient capital to innovation, then the credit crunch will not in the long run prevent the relentless upward march of human living standards.

Self-sufficiency is therefore not the route to prosperity. ‘Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month,’ Henry David Thoreau asked: ‘the boy who had made his own jack-knife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this – or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers’ penknife from his father?’

‘To produce implies that the producer desires to consume’ said John Stuart Mill; ‘why else should he give himself useless labour?’

In 2009, an artist named Thomas Thwaites set out to make his own toaster, of the sort that he could buy from a shop for about

the project took months, cost a lot of money and resulted in an inferior product. Yet to buy a £4 toaster would cost him less than an hour’s work at the minimum wage. To Thwaites this illustrated his helplessness as a consumer so divorced from self-sufficiency. It also illustrates the magic of specialisation and exchange: thousands of people, none of them motivated by the desire to do Thwaites a favour, have come together to make it possible for him to acquire a toaster for a trivial sum of money.

‘In civilized society,’ wrote Adam Smith, an individual ‘stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.’

This is what I mean by the collective brain. As Friedrich Hayek first clearly saw, knowledge ‘never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess’.

I love this quote about knowledge from The Rational Optimist

This is what I mean by the collective brain. As Friedrich Hayek first clearly saw, knowledge ‘never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess’.

#quote

this is what poverty means. You are poor to the extent that you cannot afford to sell your time for sufficient price to buy the services you need, and rich to the extent that you can afford to buy not just the services you need but also those you crave.

Two economists recently concluded, after studying the issue, that the entire concept of food miles is ‘a profoundly flawed sustainability indicator’. Getting food from the farmer to the shop causes just 4 per cent of all its lifetime emissions. Ten times as much carbon is emitted in refrigerating British food as in air-freighting it from abroad, and fifty times as much is emitted by the customer travelling to the shops.

A New Zealand lamb, shipped to England, requires one-quarter as much carbon to get on to a London plate as a Welsh lamb;

There is no such thing as unproductive employment, so long as people are prepared to buy the service you are offering.