| Permanent Link and
, author of The Rational Optimist, talks with EconTalk host
about why he is optimistic about the future and how trade and specialization explain the evolution of human development over the millennia. Ridley argues that life is getting better for most of the people on earth and that the underlying cause is trade and specialization. He discusses the differences between Smith's and Ricardo's insights into trade and growth and why despite what seems to be strong evidence, people are frequently pessimistic about the future. Ridley also addresses environmental issues.
Time: 59:3
Size: 27.5 MB
Right-click or Option-click, and select "Save Link/Target As MP3.
Readings and Links related to this podcast
Podcast Readings
HIDE READINGS
About this week's guest:
for The Rational Optimist.
About ideas and people mentioned in this podcast:
by Matt Ridley .
by Matt Ridley .
Especially Book I, Chapters 1-4 on the division of labor. Library of Economics and Liberty. No charge.
Especially Chapters I and II on barter and exchange. Library of Economics and Liberty. No charge.
by Deirdre McCloskey. October 4th, 2010, Cato Unbound.
by Gregory Clarke.
October 6th, 2010, Cato Unbound.
by Matt Ridley. October 8th, 2010, Cato Unbound.
by Ibsen Martinez. August 4, 2008, on Econlib.
, by John V. C. Nye. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
, by Sue Anne Batey Blackman and William J. Baumol. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
. Biography. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
. Biography. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
. Biography. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Web Pages:
Wikipedia .
Sarah Brosnan's research. World Science Network, May 28, 2009.
Podcasts and Blogs:
. EconTalk podcast.
. EconTalk podcast.
. EconTalk podcast.
. EconTalk podcast.
. EconTalk podcast.
Highlights
Podcast Highlights
HIDE HIGHLIGHTS
0:36Intro. [Recording date: October 14, 2010.] Book is ambitious and extraordinary achievement in both depth and breadth.
Try to do something that is a little bit beyond modest--try to explain all of human history, a small slice of what we might want to know about. Provocatively leverage the idea that trade--the ability to exchange--and the subsequent division of labor that ensues can explain much of human development, going back thousands of years. One of my ambitions is to try and take the notion of trade back into pre-history a lot further than people generally do. Tendency among anthropologists and archeologists to say that you can't do trade until you've invented law and order, government, farming, things like that. Evidence suggests that isn't true: hunter/gatherers are perfe has a crucial impact on human history. Other ambition is to say this is actually the grand theme of human history. Forget the wars, poets, culture--all important, but the theme that's running through history all the time is this tendency to divide
sometimes it shrinks again to a small scale, but gradually, inexorably, ratchet-like it grows until it gets everybody in this habit of getting other people to do things for us and doing things for other people.
Working for each other is the great theme of human history. Comes about through exc and through trade on a wider scale.
Adam Smith talked about the human propensity to truck, barter, you point out there is reciprocity among animals, but not trade.
What's the difference? Point I had trouble getting across to people. Reciprocity, which featured in my previous book, is indeed something you can find animal models, roots for.
You can find primates, baboon, things like that, that indulge in reciprocal altruism: you scratch my back, I scratch yours. Dolphins, vampire bats.
Don't turn out to be all that interesting in terms of the social behavior of animals, but it's a theme.
It's a theme of our story, too.
But I think it's different from our story, because reciprocity is: I
you do me the same favor tomorrow.
Same thing being exchanged at different times.
What I'm talking about is different things being exchanged at the same time. I give you bread if you give me money, or I give you fish if you give me a fruit, or whatever it might be.
Because it's simultaneous, you don't have this problem of defection: I could take the favor today and not return it tomorrow.
In that sense it ought to and yet you simply cannot find an animal that does this.
There is one partial exception: some insects and some birds which trade food for sex--if the male brings food, the female will allow him to mate. Outside the pair bond, you can't find examples of, as Adam Smith said, "Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog."
Got this idea straight from Adam Smith: zoological, first book of The Wealth of Nations is a very psychological, very anthropological book as well as being about economics.
Interestingly, brilliant scientist Sarah Brosnan, working on this in chimpanzees, trying to get barter going in chimpanzee colonies.
She can do it, can get chimps to barter, but only using human mediation.
They simply don't get it.
They don't want to give up something they value even if it means they can get something they value more.
They say, I wa I just want that off you.
At some point in history we crossed that threshold: realized that if I give this thing or want this thing, it's not that I don't want the fish I've got, but I want the fruit that you've got more. And you happen to be in the opposite position. Also requires a different leap of faith than the reciprocity leap of faith, that you'll come back and scratch my back tomorrow. Trade is complicated subject--seems so simple.
I give you something you don't have, you give me something I don't have. But not just that I'm going to give up something I like to have something I want more.
As a result of that trade we are going to specialize, if we really want to exploit this opportunity to trade.
Think how scary it is: I'm going to only make one thing in the expectation and hope--and this is what we all do in our trading--that someone else will want it and will give me the other things I don't have.
Requires me to assume that eventually someone will come along with those desires who likes my stuff and who has something I want-- that wa and that they'll feel the same way I do, and take that risk to swap. Right in emphasizing--can see in the animal world, if you spend your time doing only one thing, if you didn't get those trading partners, you are going to die. How we navigated this move away from self-sufficiency--and by the way, people say we need self-sufficiency, food security, oil security--actually, self-sufficiency is terrifically vulnerable.
Look at what happened when countries had to grow their own food in the Middle Ages--one bad harvest and everybody's starving. Now, one bad harvest a food flows around the world and everybody gets a bit. Some people suffer if the p but you don't get starvation on a wide scale.
8:33On the animal thing, the pair bond is very important.
There is specialization in the animal world--you do have sexual division of labor. But only in the family. Right.
You have the reproductive division of labor a lot, and that's the one we don't have. Ironically. In ants, leave the repr we'll do the working, she does the reproducing. In honeybees, brilliant system, means you can build up giant families which we call colonies which work very well and have divisions of labor with them, sometimes quite sophisticated divisions of labor between different kinds of workers, soldiers versus workers. But they can never go beyond the colony, which is basically a big family, because it is based on this reproductive division of labor. Like to joke: reproductive specialization is the one thing we don' insist on being self-sufficient. I'm not happy to find that my Queen is doing all the reproducing for me, even in England--ha ha. But the sexual division of labor, the phrase anthropologists use for male hunting versus female gathering, and the sharing that then follows--that's a pretty uniquely human thing.
You do get species in which the two sexes specialize in terms of hunting, but they don't often do a lot of sharing afterwards.
The idea that I go hunting for meat and my wife goes digging for roots and we then come back and share may be the oldest example of a gain from trade--of a real Ricardian or Smithian gain from trade.
Beautiful system on the African savannah: If I'm a male, my chances of coming back with a dead warthog are pretty low.
A lot days I'm going to come back empty-handed. How I am going to feed on such a day? I can rely on the fact that my wife is digging up some roots, so there is going to be something to eat. On the other hand: from her point of view, roots are all very well, but I'd really like some prote but I just can't afford the time or risk the effort of going hunting, particularly with kids to look after.
I'm in a beautiful situation because he can go hunting.
If I want warthog meat, all I have to do is dig some roots, and then I've got something to trade for warthog meat. Both sides benefit from the exchange.
11:40Books opens with extraordinary chapter that I am adding to my pantheon of favorite collections of how much life has changed. You start off by saying: Life's a lot better than it was 5,000 or 10,000 or 20,000 years ago, but it's even a lot better than 100 years ago, something I've written about. A lot better than 50 years ago.
We find it so difficult to appreciate that incredible transformation. Going to come back and talk about trade more, but put that in the context you do at the beginning of the book, which is the optimism. James Buchanan said this beautifully the other day here at George Mason: When I look to the future I get very nervous but when I look to the past I feel pretty good. A lot of times when things look bleak--take the Great Depression for a modern example.
If you were alive in 1933 when unemployment was 25%, your forecast for where the U.S. economy was going in the next 40 years would be very bleak.
Turned out to be a bad prediction. Turned out that we recovered fairly quickly--though a lot of suffering and hardship.
But the long-run trend is so easy to forget that. Talk about your underlying optimism. I became an adult in the 1970s--I was 21 in 1979. Pretty depressing decade in many ways, particularly if you were in Britain.
We basically considered oursel turned the lights off two days a week.
Wasn't just Britain.
The population was said
f cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was going
our sperm counts were the forests wer the desert was advancing at 2 miles a year. Unemployment was rising, inflation was high, the oil
and we were going to have to get used to negative growth, or whatever. Nobody ever said anything to me about how the future was going to be great. The grown-ups never discussed it. Over the next two decades, as I watched my country snap out of recession, have a pretty tidy boom spread through and then I saw China and India take off. Extraordinary reduction in polity, ill health. Hundreds of millions of millions of people--not like some little corner where they caught onto something and did a little better. Glorious 25 years.
Not only that, people became healthier, wealthier, lived longer, and they became more equal. L realized the world has always been getting better, and everybody is always saying it's about to get worse. Amazed by the numbers. Lifespan up one-third in my lifetime--globally, not talking about any one country. Per capita income trebled in my lifetime in real terms, includes A at a time when the population has doubled. There is this thing called prosperity, and it's actually growing.
Not saying--and I'm not being Dr. Pangloss, this is the best of all possible worlds--that's exactly what I'm not saying. What I'm saying is: Don't you dare try and stop now, because this is still a vale of tears.
Do you realize how much richer we could get if we really pushed forward with the human experiment? how many people we could still get out of poverty. Despair about Africa, people saying it is never going to get rich.
They said that about India 30 years ago.
It's not rich yet but it's on the way.
Can tell from the tone of my voice--this has become an evangelical issue for me.
Want to spread the good news about how good it could get.
I find nobody knows. Everybody thinks they are no richer than when they were born.
They forget that they live longer than that the population growth rate has fallen.
They don't hear the good news. Part is they literally don't hear it: it is often not the focus of most news coverage.
Also the fact of what the human brain focuses on.
Part of why we like horror movies, I guess.
Don't fully understand it.
It's the question people ask me most and the one I have the least satisfactory answer to. Just-so stories, focusing on things that might go wrong is probably more rewarding than being complacent about the world.
Fascination with pessimism surprising. Quote from H. G. Wells, "The man who despairs when others hope is regarded by a large class of persons as a sage." Why is that?
Wiser if you are gloomy. Nothing wrong with being gloomy right now in 2010; we've got other political/economic problems that loom.
But if you step back just a titch the prospective is pretty cheerful. Don't want to belittle the problems people have. Part of my ambition is to get people to be ambitious about solving problems.
We take things for granted.
Some hilarious examples of this: cursing the fact that you can't get a signal on your mobile phone, or flight across the Atlantic is delayed by one hour.
Just talked about this a couple of podcasts ago with de Botton. We get furious when the world doesn't work the way we couldn't have imagined it working ten years ago. Not just like 100 years ago--10 years ago. We say, I hate supermarkets. Someone is chopping and washing salad and packaging it so it's beautifully fresh and charging me almost nothing for it.
Why are they doing that? Very nice of them!
Not doing it out of love--out of self-interest.
Podcast with Deborah Gordon, ant expert. Distinction between human and animal behavior fascinates me.
19:47Criticism one could make of your thesis of optimism: sustainability. What you've just said is something many economists--not too many, but some--believe that things are not only getting better but they will continue to get better. One of the arguments against that isn't just the financial crisis.
We can imagine that we'll get by.
May take 5 years, 10 years, 3 months, whatever--but we can imagine like with the Great Depression that we will put it behind us at some point.
What about the limits that some people worry about that we're reducing the resource base of the planet: Okay, in 1978 we were overly pessimistic, but ultimately these are finite resources. Along with global warming, we are eventually going to have trouble sustaining not just the growth rate but maybe growth at all, and we may plunge into a much darker era. What's your argument against that? Completely misunderstands the nature of what we do with resources.
For a start, we do more with less.
That's the nature of growth--to get more energy out of each gallon of oil we burn by devising more efficient cars or whatever it is.
Our rate of use of resources per work we get out of them is always improving.
Secondly, if you look at the human footprint on the land--how much landscape are we needing for our uses, it's very interesting.
It keeps going down.
What I mean by that is that back in the 19th century before we invented synthetic fertilizers, we had to raid more and more land because our population was going up.
Thank goodness for the American prairies and the Argentinian pampas and the steppes of Russia because if we hadn't been able to plow those, there would have been mass starvation as the population expanded in Europe. We exported people
just kept going that way. About 1900, William Crooks: We've got a wheat problem, land problem: we are going to run out of wheat and we are all going to starve. About 10 years later, Haber invented the Haber process--a way of getting the nitrogen in the air and using it as fertilizer, and increasing the productivity of land.
Result is now we've quadrupled the population in this century just ended, and we've pretty well extinguished starvat and we've slightly reduced the amount of land under the plow. We've returned a lot of land to forest in places like the eastern seaboard of North America for example. If we were to continue doing that in the next century--population only going to go up one and a half times instead of four times--we could imagine feeding the world from a much smaller acreage than today, when there's 9 billion people, much higher standard, plenty of meat for everybody and the rain forests would be bigger, not smaller. Somebody would say that's at the expense of, say, using more natural gas, which we use to make fertilizer. Yes, but we're getting our energy now from a hole in the ground--coal mines, etc. We don't have to get it from the landscape.
We used to have to get it from the forests, the streams, the wind.
These were the ways we powered civilization before.
Now we can let the forests grow and rot and suppo let the streams run free for salmon because we don't need to dam them. Every stream in Britain was dammed everywhere possible by the end of the Middle Ages to make mills. We've got this upside down.
We're reducing our impact on the land. Imagine if we were hunter-gatherers.
We'd need 1000 hectares each to support our lifestyle. If everybody in Manhattan tried that, there would not be a lot of wildlife left in North America. In many ways, our impact on the planet can get less because of growth. Growth is the only thing that can make civilization sustainable.
25:20You sound kind of Dr. Panglossian there. Since I share your view, have to indict myself as well.
Let me give the counterpoint.
Your point about the rivers running free and trees growing is a gorgeous point.
But the skeptic would say: We've scarred the earth, we've strip-mined the coal, we've unleashed all this carbon.
We get better and better at using any one gallon of crude oil or ton of coal--cleaner and more efficient than it used to be. No reason to think that process will ever stop.
People talk about using up the oil, coal, uranium, phosphate--phosphorous is an element we have to mine to support our agriculture--high concentration ores running out.
But the low concentration ones are not, and they are all over the world. There is not a single example of a non-renewable resource that has run out. Nobody ran out of stone in the stone age or iron in the iron-age or bronze in the bronze-age. That's not the reason these ages peter out--it's because people move on to something else. Whereas renewable resources have a nasty tendency to run out.
Whales, passenger pigeons, white pine forests.
Obsession to moving to renewable resources seems a bit weird.
The phosphorous that we use in agriculture gets washed down our rivers and ends at some point we'll mine the mud of our estuaries if we need to. Passage in book about evolution of guano--bird droppings--to synthetically-produced fertilizer. Prophecy that we would starve to death because we didn't have any more fertilizer because we'd used up all the bird droppings.
Peak bird-dropping problem. Misunderstands the nature of creativity. Julian Simon has written eloquently on this. Need to pay tribute to a lot of people. I have to throw in a plug for The Choice and The Invisible Heart. There is one resource that people are using up and I can't yet prove that we are not, and that's the capacity of the atmosphere for absorbing our emissions.
We've got better at the other kinds of emissions--sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide from car exhausts. Car is now 19 million percent cleaner than it was in my youth in about 1970. That's why you don't have smog in Pasadena as you did 30 years ago. You can actually see the mountains.
Can we do the same with carbon?
We're working on it. About to see a major shift to using a lot of natural gas in the next few decades instead of coal and oil for generating electricity because of the shale gas revolution. Natural gas has, I think, a quarter as much carbon per energy as coal does. More effective than building wind turbines, which doesn't reduce carbon at all, because of backup problem.
Can we do it fast enough, before it damages the climate?
I've had a hard look at climate science and I can see definite evidence we might be doing something to the climate t cannot see evidence we are doing anything fast and dangerous yet.
I think we've got plenty of time to work on this problem.
I suspect we'll give up fossil fuels before they run out. People often say to me: Well, if you don't believe in climate change, surely you believe that fossil fuels are going to run out. I reply: Well, if fossil fuels are going to run out, why are you worried about climate change? Should be, because we will start burning those forests down. Unless we stop worrying about being cold.
30:45Let me raise a different question.
Book is ambitious, panoramic look at human development.
Start with the hunter-gatherer, go through agriculture, move to cities, industrialization, modern world. Running through that story is the power of trade. As a student of Ricardo on Smith, Russ Roberts podcast. Ricardo's theme, which you use many times in the book, is that differences between us allow us to get more than we could on our own. Standard economic lesson not fully absorbed by the public. While we have this evolutionary process of cultural and human change from hunter-gatherer to farmer to urbanization to industrialization to the so-called knowledge economy, through an enormous part of that history there was very little progress. While it's true that at the micro level, being able to trade with you, my near neighbor, not just my family member but my strange neighbor and in a city with a bunch of strangers--how powerful is the source when in fact most of the improvement took place in the last 250 years and before that the overwhelming story is one of getting by.
How do you reconcile the story of the power of trade with that seemingly undeniable fact? Just had an exchange on the Cato website with Deirdre McCloskey on exactly this. Two words: piracy and fossil fuels.
Piracy point: human history is a competition between the kind of wealth generation I've talked about and the kind of wealth-eeking that comes from chiefs, thieves, predators, parasites, and rent-seekers.
Wake up in the morning: Am I going to get rich by exchanging with someone or by pinching someone else's wealth--through conquest, plunder, subjugation or whatever it might be.
The story of nearly all trade booms is that you get wonderful efflorescences of human prosperity and then someone comes along and eats them either by conquering or by bureaucratizing them. The Greeks, Phoenecians before that, Italian city states, Dutch trading position. Free city states create enormous prosperity and then along comes the Roman Empire. China when decentralized, because extremely rich and had a huge amount of trade with the world, and then the Ming Empire comes along and shuts everything down: We're going to regulate everything and tax everything. Close our borders.
In Holland's case, the Dutch had a great thing going in the 17th century.
What killed it? The fact that they had to keep spending huge fortunes fighting wars against Louis the XIV. You can trace this process back on a different scale right back to 160,000 years ago. Archeological group in London looking at these explosive areas of new technologies in Africa, in demographic terms. Increased population, people exchan they can't prove that piracy is what destroyed it but in the end that would be my guess. Warfare breaks apart these civilizations.
Have to admit there is this weird discontinu people like Robin Hanson good at reminding me of this--at around 200 years ago. Any boom you could look at--Italy, Venice, Holland, etc.--doesn't really work at raising human living standards because it just gets started and then runs into a Malthusian correction often--the population grows and you start to get a resource constraint.
I like Greg Clark's analysis: that you escape the Malthusian trap--we Brits do--and then the rest of the world comes barreling through the hole with us.
In the 19th century.
Britain had a great 18th century--kind of the Dutch trade, lucky because the English channel meant it didn't have to build up got trade with East Asia and A slave trade not so beautiful. Get growth of Britain the 18th century but real wages for the average Brit had not gone up much by the end of the 18th century. If it had stopped there, then we would talk about it like we talk about ancient Greece.
But what happened in the early 19th century was we harnessed fossil fuels--something that wasn't showing diminishing returns, a source of energy, amplific the more you got out of this stuff called coal, the cheaper it got.
Wasn't true for forests or agricultural land, get more expensive the more you use them.
Opposite of diminishing returns--you get increasing returns.
That makes me quite old-fashioned. Theory used to be that coal helped transform the i but then went out of favor and people are talking about institutions and things like that. If you look at the graph of human living standards, GDP per capita, it takes a step change 200 years ago and starts going up at a much faster rate.
I think we need a special explanation for that, and I think it's about getting cheap energy.
39:11Could be.
Deirdre has her idea that it was okay to be bourgeoisie.
Interesting idea, don't know if it's testable.
I don't have an answer either. If you can only trade with a relatively small number of people, which in primitive t and even in the Middle Ages--we've tried "buy local" before and it's called the Middle Ages--occasionally a guy would come through from far away and bring you some spices, but most of trade is division of labor among a relatively small group of people.
For whatever reason, when prices of transportation fell enough--partly because of coal, partly the steam engine, other innovations--you could suddenly trade with a very much larger group of people. Tota theme in your book--that took us from a Ricardian world to a Smithian world.
Smith had talked about the division of labor being limited by the extent of the market--that little cute phrase--once we got the opportunity to trade with such a larger group, which is what modernity is, then the process has a life of its own.
Challenging you with, first read in Robert Lucas's writings: the process of farming was the same in the 1700s as it was in Rome.
You lived pretty much the same life in terms of how much protein, nutrition you could wrest from the earth. Something changed.
Once that changed, suddenly you could get more and mor and that revolution is the one that could last forever.
It looks like.
Do think that's a very perceptive analysis.
However, would caution that compared with the modern world, the world of 1700 A.D. but it isn't static in technological terms.
There are an accumulation of technologies--perfection of the horse collar, etc.--that may not improve the standard of living all that much because the population goes up or something like that.
An 18th century ship was much more efficient than a Roman sailing ship.
Simply that the graph is going up at a slower rate before that.
Love this point about specialization and exchange on a wider scale.
The wider the scale, the more it brings you into contact who have differences--different preferences, native abilities, natural endowments. Beauty of the Ricardian thing, gains from trade: the more you specialize the more you've got to exchange and the more you've got to exchange, the more it pays to specialize.
Virtuous circle.
The Smith point: the more you specialize--Mike Munger podcast and then I did one as a solo--the more you specialize, the more advantageous it is to apply technology to it, and capital.
That's the modern story. Not so much the story of the past, some of it.
That opportunity to benefit from the productivity of labor embodied in capital that Smith talks about is what sets it going crazy.
Just got an iP son sent me an app I wasn't so interested in--he's 12.
W said when you get one in 5 years, a chip that's put under your skin that when you think about the game a virtual, holographic screen appears in front of you, you can get it then. The things we enjoy today are not just things we couldn't imagine 150 years ago--they couldn't be imagined 15 years ago.
Makes you wonder what will be available 15 years from now.
Written exchange this morning about climate, government adviser: I don't think we should be blase about even 2 degrees over 200 years.
I replied: Are you implying that someone in 1810 should have used his technologies to try and influence the world in 2010?
Because that's what you are saying: that I should be doing something today with my existing technologies about the world in 2210. Sorry, but I think my existing technologies are going to be laughably irrelevant in influencing that world.
The future is very opaque, always will be.
I have no background as an economist.
As a reporter gradually came to cover economics issues.
No courses of any kind, totally autodidactic on Smith and Ricardo.
To some extent that helps me.
46:09Conversation you just reported, some of the reason we are so pessimistic.
When someone says you've got to do xyz to help people 200 years from now and point out that 200 years ago, could you imagine them talking about what we would have available to us--it's a lack of imagination. Being forced because we live in the present, not
but it's a fear of the future without taking account of anything we've learned from the past. Joke, laughable, inhuman literally to not imagine what would be available 200 years from now.
Everything around us tells us that's the thesis of a child.
It's hard to step back because time goes slow for us, but in the scope of human progress, we are looking at a nanosecond. Remembering to be dynamic about the future. You think of where we've got to as static, but it's always changing.
Possibility of perpetual change is something we don't notice.
Three hundred years ago we could have lived our lives and not seen a new technology. Somebody could have come along to the village with a new kind of plow. Wouldn't be much of an improvement.
Now, dithering about getting an iPad, maybe waiting for next generation.
To throw back at you what is often thrown back at me on that: The past is no guide to the future.
Stockbroker argument: just because something's gone up doesn't mean it's going to keep going up.
The fact that a whole bunch of white swans have swung past doesn't mean the next one won't be black.
People find this a bit
you are just doing extrapolation.
Suggests there is a dogmatic faith that you and I have.
Colleague Don Boudreaux writes about this as well.
Just because the future always gets brighter, will it always get brighter? Often comes up in the exhaustion of natural resources.
But this time it could be different?
Could be catastrophic.
It could be a good idea not always to extrapolate from the past, not naively.
But your extrapolation and mine isn't naive.
Our optimism isn't because we look at a trend line and say: It's always been getting better so it probably will always keep doing so. It's because we saying something about the underlying process that produces that improvement.
It's not because in winter as it keeps getting colder--oh my gosh, entering a new ice age!
Understand the science of the seasons--it gets warmer again.
Underlying ability of the human enterprise.
For example, talking about the iPad: biggest model is 64 gigabytes, $699. No camera, no video.
You are thinking maybe you'll wait, maybe it will get bigger, better.
If I say to you: Oh, you are just going to assume it's going to keep getting better? What if it gets worse!
That would be stupid assumption.
Why are you so confident that the next generation will be lighter, faster, bigger?
Know there are guys working on improvements, whole industry there.
If it turns out there's a better way that comes along, it won't get better--it will disappear.
Why am I so confident that something as marvelous as this working toy is--I'm 5 days into it, I'm addicted to it, I may come out of it--why is it I think there will be something better and this will look like the cell phone of 1992 which will look like a giant walkee talkee? Is it just because I'm a mindless optimist about the future? No; that's why your book is called the rational optimist.
You know something.
We live i don't think people will learn to swing their arms and fly.
Rational important word in my title.
I've arrived at optimism through argument.
I'm not a particularly cheery person.
Has affected my behavior in life, writing this book.
Conversations: grumpy old men conversations: moan about the modern world, kick myself.
Everything's fine!
They look at me like I've gone bad.
Good for internal well-being, not good for social life.
When we go through a period like now--and your book was written in the middle of this, launching into a headwind.
People now are saying it was a good run in America, but now we've got this Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare crisis--we can ruin our political system with some stupid things, always at risk of that.
Struck by how pessimistic America's mood is. You guys tend to cheer us up.
56:26Observation, being self-taught.
Your book is an implicit homage to Adam Smith.
In 1776 he comes along and says a bunch of things revol saw things people didn' made the point that money isn't everything, that mercantilism, accumulating silver and gold, is not the source of the wealth of nations--that the source of wealth is our skills and what we can produce.
Goes one to say where does it come from--the division of labor.
Do you find it strange that over 200 years ago that book gets written and we don't understand the lesson? Don't really teach it in our economics classes.
How strange is that?
What were my school teachers doing not teaching me about this?
Most brilliant idea I've ever come across with possible exception of Darwin's natural selection. Nobody ever told me about this.
Found it out embarrassingly late in life. At least there's something for me to do in the world.
Prosperity is accumulation.
Still work to do. Exciting game to contribute to.
Comments and Sharing
CATEGORIES:
TWITTER: Follow Russ Roberts