• Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010, 420 pages, $26.99

The message of this book is: Be optimistic about the future. The reason we should remain optimistic is the past.

The liberal intelligentsia argue that we will soon reach a turning point, and things will start to get worse. They have been saying this for ages. Each generation believes that the end of progress has finally come, and it must save mankind with radical measures.

However, millions of minds working in the market devise new technologies, new procedures with which to cope, to improve, to innovate. The debacle never happens. Pessimism is not new, nor is rational optimism. Englishman Matt Ridley quotes Thomas Babington Macaulay, British poet, historian, and Whig politician of the early 19th Century, who asked: “On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”

Ridley finds life getting better and explains how and why. He is author of books on evolution, genetics, and society that have sold more than 800,000 copies. “Rational optimism holds that the world will pull out of the current crisis because of the way that markets in goods, services, and ideas allow human beings to exchange and specialize honestly for the betterment of all,” he writes. “So this is not a book of unthinking praise or condemnation of all markets, but it is an inquiry into how the market process of exchange and specialization is older and fairer than many think and gives a vast reason for optimism about the future of the human race. Above all it is a book about the benefits of change.”

The Rational Optimist is rich with examples that also enliven the text for the reader. For example, since 1800 the world’s population has multiplied six times, yet average life expectancy has more than doubled and real income has risen more than nine times. People earned more money, ate more calories, lost fewer children, had a longer life, and were more literate. He says it is hard to find any region on the planet that is worse off in 2005 than it was in 1955. He notes that the middle class of 1955, which had cars, comforts and gadgets, would today be described as “below the poverty line.”

What is the cost of progress? The environment is being degraded somewhere, perhaps in Beijing. But in many other places, it is not. Europe and America are becoming cleaner all the time.

However, the pessimists are ever at work. In 1914 the U.S. Bureau of Mines predicted that oil reserves would last 10 years. President Jimmy Carter announced demand for oil would overtake production by the end of the 1980s. Yet by 1990, unexploited reserves amounted to 900 billion barrels of oil, and there are huge shale gas finds.

Consider what can be done with discretionary income to purchase, for example, lighting. An hour of work today earns 300 days’ worth of reading light. In 1800 it earned 10 minutes’ worth. Similar statistics support the points Ridley makes.

In the 1990s, economist Paul Romer espoused a “new growth theory.” He saw that innovation, which is limitless, was a type of investment and applied knowledge was a product.

Yet many elites continue preaching pessimism even in the absence of evidence to support it. Economist Julian Simon said the world would continue getting better and better. He was castigated, but there was no significant error in his work. Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist contains no significant errors, but he was temporarily “convicted” of scientific dishonesty by the Danish National Academy of Sciences and given no opportunity to defend himself.

The Rational Optimist takes in all of human history. It asserts that because of the capacity of the human race to innovate, even though disasters will occur, the future will enhance human prosperity and natural biodiversity.

Ridley challenges everyone to “dare to be an optimist.”