In early hunter-gatherer societies, where neighboring tribes fought for scarce resources, violence was often imminent. Right up until the Industrial Revolution, life was dominated by violence, famine, illness and early death. In reality, this rose-tinted view of history is far from the truth the past was a truly dreadful time to live. Some even argue that our own society should be modeled on those of the past. They suggest that because past societies lacked such modern problems, they were simpler and more idyllic. Many of these experts argue that the solution to escaping these impending modern catastrophes lies in the past.

They contend that new diseases are unstoppable, famine will kill billions, overpopulation will ruin the environment and climate change will destroy the planet. The Rational Optimist will do for economics what Genome did for genomics and will show that the answer to our problems, imagined or real, is to keep on doing what we've been doing for 10,000 years - to keep on changing.Today, when we read a newspaper or watch TV, we are confronted by numerous experts expounding on the dangers of the modern world and telling us to fear coming calamities. In this original, optimistic book, Matt Ridley puts forward his surprisingly simple answer to how humans progress, arguing that we progress when we trade and we only really trade productively when we trust each other. Yet, bizarrely, however much things improve from the way they were before, people still cling to the belief that the future will be nothing but disastrous. The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going erratically upwards for 10,000 years and has rapidly accelerated over the last 200 years: calories vitamins clean water machines privacy the means to travel faster than we can run, and the ability to communicate over longer distances than we can shout. Today there are more than 6 billion, 99 per cent of whom are better fed, better sheltered, better entertained and better protected against disease than their Stone Age ancestors. Over 10,000 years ago there were fewer than 10 million people on the planet. In The Rational Optimist Ridley offers a counterblast to the prevailing pessimism of our age, and proves, however much we like to think to the contrary, that things are getting better. Matt Ridley, acclaimed author of the classics Genome and Nature via Nurture, turns from investigating human nature to investigating human progress.

The rational optimist review