Nehaveigur

Reading and thinking about Birds, Sex & Beauty by Matt Ridely reminded me of his other books I’ve read over the years. He’s a wonderful writer and keen observer, especially in his books. His political writing, for example in the Times, is angrier and not always well argued.

The first time I came across Ridley was when I read his 2003 book Nature via Nurture while studying Evolutionary Theory as an undergraduate. Since then, I have read The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, How Innovation Works, and most recently, Birds, Sex & Beauty. I don’t remember much about Nature via Nurture except that I liked it enough to return to Ridely’s writing again and again. For the subsequent books, I took notes, which, reviewing them now, are still interesting and worth sharing. In this post, I’ll start with The Rational Optimist, which came out in 2010 and which I read in 2011.

The Rational Optimist attempts to dispel the notion that things are getting worse all the time. Most things are getting better, and markets and collaboration are a big reason. They aren’t only very human, but also make us more human, in the best sense:

Collaboration between unrelated strangers seems to be a uniquely human achievement. In no other species can two individuals that have never before met exchange goods or services to the benefit of each other, as happens routinely each time you visit a shop or a restaurant or a website […] ‘Wherever the ways of man are gentle, there is commerce, and wherever there is commerce, the ways of men are gentle,’ observed Charles, Baron de Montesquieu.

On land use:

Taking all cereal crops together worldwide, in 2005 twice as much grain was produced from the same acreage as in 1968 […] Now that weeds can be controlled by herbicides rather than ploughing (the main function of a plough is to bury weeds), more and more crops are sown directly into the ground without tilling. This reduces soil erosion, silt run-off and the massacre of innocent small animals of the soil […] economist Colin Clark calculated that human beings could in theory sustain themselves on just twenty-seven square metres of land each […] On this basis and using the yields of the day, Clark calculated in the 1960s that the world could feed thirty-five billion mouths […] So a hectare fed about eight people, or about 1,250 square metres each, down from about 4,000 square metres in the 1950s. That is a long way above 100 square metres […] Running out of land to capture sunlight is not going to be a problem for food production – not since Haber broke the fertiliser bottleneck. Running out of water could well be.

On the relationship between science and innovation, a topic Ridley a decade later revisited in How Innovation Works:

Science is much more like the daughter than the mother of technology […] Few of the inventions that made the industrial revolution owed anything to scientific theory […] Throughout the industrial revolution, scientists were the beneficiaries of new technology, much more than they were the benefactors.

The Rational Optimist came out in 15 years ago, but it remains relevant:

The coincidence of wealth with toleration has led to the bizarre paradox of a conservative movement that embraces economic change but hates its social consequences and a liberal movement that loves the social consequences but hates the economic source from which they come […] Increasing self-sufficiency is the very signature of a civilisation under stress, the definition of a falling standard of living […] Imagine if the globalised world of the twenty-first century allows a globalised retreat from reason. It is a worrying thought.