Book Review: The Case for Rational Optimism
In the 1800s, a transportation expert warned that if horse-drawn travel continued apace, city streets would fill with 10 feet of manure by the year 1950. He proved wrong about horses but right about the volume of manure, which still flows unabated from gloom & doom prognosticators.
In his new book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, author Matt Ridley flogs the school of pessimism that dominates business, media and, well, just about everything. Granted, with oil spewing from a mile deep gusher, a no-gain decade in equity markets, ongoing concerns about the economy — and in our own space — questions on whether or when telco capex for BSS/OSS will pick up, one’s gut reaction is to view the positive with skepticism and to question whether any optimist is in full possession of his senses. Rest assured that Ridley is no New Age nut case, but a respected expert and author on topics ranging from evolution to human nature and genetics. In The Rational Optimist, he simply points out the overlooked obvious.
To wit, most doom-saying is hair-brained. Over the last 200 years, and particularly in more recent times, science, technology and communications have — contrary to what the “end is nigh” crowd thinks — vastly improved the quality of life. Human lifespans have doubled, food is cheaper and more plentiful, infant mortality has declined, many diseases have been eradicated, employment and pay have risen, leisure time has increased, and on and on. Even from 1900 – 1950, a period marked by two world wars and global depression, most measures of human advancement rose across the globe. It seems we progress even in the worst of times, sometimes despite the odds and ourselves. How can that be?
Ridley credits “the rapid, continuous and incessant change that human society experiences in a way that no other animal does.” Change is driven by the unceasing acceleration of ideas, and even moreso, through their exchange in a process mirroring Darwinian natural selection. When shared, our ideas — like genes — replicate, mutate, compete, select, accumulate, and create something new that moves us forward. Ridley amusingly likens the process to “ideas having sex.” Their spawn are innovation, progress and perhaps most importantly, dynamism. There is no “steady state” in the ever-expanding universe of ideas, nor in economics, markets, nature, nor life itself.
Pessimism is the common byproduct of the “steady state” fallacy. Had rail and motorized traffic never come to pass, the man who predicted city streets awash in horse droppings might have proved a seer. Instead gas-powered vehicles not imagined in his day shoved the man’s dire prediction off the road.
Some years later, around the moment we were to have been engulfed in manure, IBM’s founder scoffed at the idea that computers would one day become popular business tools and household devices. Such skepticism was understandable since at the time computers were roughly the size of a house. Then in Silicon Valley, ideas had sex. Out popped the microprocessor enabling Microsoft, Apple and Dell to venture onto turf their predecessors could not foresee.
Notwithstanding the wonders wrought by the petrochemical and computing revolutions, most of us should be dead by now, the victims of modern plagues ranging from HIV to SARS, avian flu and swine flu, and the few lone survivors wandering in a barren land deforested by acid rain. So the naysayers have predicted for years. Given their proclivity for scaring the wits out of us with disasters that never materialize, one wonders if the new pet crisis of global warming is humbug, too. Not that it matters whether the threat of catastrophe is real. Mankind, which has never had it so good, nonetheless savors an appetite for the apocalypse. Go figure.
If you haven’t picked up Matt Ridley’s book yet, please do so. It’s a refreshing break from the brooding economic jeremiads now in vogue, and an ideal tonic for steady state thinking.
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