Summary
Matt Ridley sets out to explain why, despite how it may feel, we live in the brightest point in history and the future is likely to be even brighter. Homo Sapiens are an incredible species, which always raises the question of how we got to be this way. What set us on this path that allowed us to specialize in ways unique in our known universe. Ridley wants to argue that the distinguishing feature was trade. Trade allows for specialization, and we should think of specialization as skill storage. You learn how to make an axe, I’ll learn how to grow corn etc. etc. In this way the amount of knowledge available continues to grow the more trading connections we enter into. For a few ears of corn, I can make use of years of R&D that you’ve committed to making the axe. From a game theory point of view this is a win win. As you can make axes better than me, and I can grow corn better than you. The result is a net increase in material wealth. As the community grows and more nodes in the form of human brains join the network, the amount of specialized knowledge grows combinatorically because although the skills are siloed the results are not. For example, if you make a better axe, I can clear forests easier to make more corn than before and so on. This is a fundamental argument for free and global trade, as there seems to be no upper limit to idea storage in the universe.
Thoughts
I enjoyed this book; it is another one of those books that I was biased to accept from the beginning as we seemed share similar world views. I was already familiar with some of his ideas through other people so not a lot of surprises, most were laid out convincingly. Some weak points in my opinion are the seemingly free pass given to exploiters. He is responding to the popular trend of disliking business magnates, and it seems like he goes too far the other way. For example, he criticizes Marx for criticizing factories in England without taking into account that factory life as terrible as it was, still managed to be better than farm life in England at that time. This explains why so many farmers moved to the city to work in factories. He extends this to sweatshops in East Asia again arguing that people work there because whatever other options aren’t as good and so the sweat shop represents an upgrade in wealth. I did not find this argument convincing; I don’t think he would either if he had to work in one, at the same time knowing that the owner was living a life of luxury. I do agree with him though, that in the long run sweat shops appear to reduce poverty, it just takes generations for this to happen, so I would hope there was a way to have the omelet without the broken eggs. Lab grown omelets? There were several other things that are possible attack vectors on this book, but overall, I thought it was really good. One of his main points is that “if it bleeds it leads” applies just as much to our brains as to our newspapers. Therefore, someone saying “we are all going to die” takes up way more mental space than someone saying, “it is likely we will make it”. No matter what your views are on the book itself, we should hope he is right, and humanity continues to innovate itself into higher living standards for everyone.