The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

Cooking enabled hominids to trade gut size for brain size.

cooking encourages specialisation by sex. The first and deepest division of labour is the sexual one. It is an iron rule documented in virtually all foraging people that ‘men hunt, women and children gather’.

Without trade, innovation just does not happen. Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. It stimulates novelty.

few hundred people cannot sustain a sophisticated technology: trade is a vital part of the story.

‘Tasmanian effect’

But is trade made possible by the milk of human kindness, or the acid of human self-interest?

As a broad generalisation, the more people trust each other in a society, the more prosperous that society is, and trust growth seems to precede income growth.

In her classic book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson called upon scientists to turn their backs on chemical pesticides and seek ‘biological solutions’ to pest control instead. They have done so, and the organic movement has rejected them.

Empires, indeed governments generally, tend to be good things at first and bad things the longer they last.

The message from history is so blatantly obvious – that free trade causes mutual prosperity while protectionism causes poverty – that it seems incredible that anybody ever thinks otherwise.

Trade, says Johann Norberg, is like a machine that turns potatoes into computers, or anything into anything: who would not want to have such a machine at their disposal?

It is somewhat distasteful to the intelligentsia to accept that consumption and commerce could be the friend of population control, or that it is when they ‘enter the market’ as consumers that people plan their families – this is not what most market-phobic professors, preaching anticapitalist asceticism, want to hear. Yet the relationship is there, and it is strong.

‘As generations of mill girls and seamstresses from Europe, America and Asia are bound together by this common sweatshop experience – controlled, exploited, overworked, and underpaid – they are bound together too by one absolute certainty, shared across both oceans and centuries: this beats the hell out of life on the farm.’

The reason that the poverty of early industrial England strikes us so forcibly is that this was the first time writers and politicians took notice of it and took exception to it, not because it had not existed before.

Or they allowed their bureaucrats to write too many rules, their chiefs to wage too many wars, or their priests to build too many monasteries (in effect, the merchants’ sons became soldiers, sybarites or monks).

They could find no evidence that aid resulted in growth in any countries. Ever.

Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo who concludes, bleakly, ‘aid doesn’t work, hasn’t worked, and won’t work ... no longer part of the potential solution, it’s part of the problem – in fact, aid is the problem.’

(Incidentally, there is now overwhelming evidence that well crafted property rights are also the key to wildlife and nature conservation. Whether considering fish off Iceland, kudu in Namibia, jaguars in Mexico, trees in Niger, bees in Bolivia or water in Colorado, the same lesson applies. Give local people the power to own, exploit and profit from natural resources in a sustainable way and they will usually preserve and cherish those resources. Give them no share in a wildlife resource that is controlled – nay ‘protected’ – by a distant government and they will generally neglect, ruin and waste it. That is the real lesson of the tragedy of the commons.)

It is a common trick to forecast the future on the assumption of no technological change, and find it dire.