This is an excellent book. It is a wonderful romp through history and technology to justify Ridley's claim that we should be optimistic about the future. I especially admire his Chapter 10 where he shreds the idiotic doomsday "predictions" of the last 50 years. He's a bit younger than me, so his list pretty well covers the list of outrageous claims that got publicity and public dollars wasted during my lifetime. As well, we both got sucked into some of these "causes" in our youth but came to realize that these doomsday "prophets" were essentially in business to collect donations and extort public monies to support their "message". So we are now innoculated to the common human illusion that there was a "golden age" in the past, the current generation is going to the dogs, and that all new technology is a dangerous threat.
He examines the idea of human progress and asks what causes it. After examining and rejecting a number of the standard explanations, he puts forth his favoured explanation: humans share ideas, this gives us the ability to "progress" that no other species has. He dresses this up as "when ideas have sex" but that's just his journalistic urge to make ideas lively and memorable. By the way, he is an excellent writer with a very readable style. I've read most of his earlier books and enjoyed them all.
Here's a snippet to give a taste of his writing style:
Like biological evolution, the market is a bottom-up world with nobody in charge. As the Australian economist Peter Saunders argues, 'Nobody planned the global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it. This particularly offends intellectuals, for capitalism renders them redundant. It gets on perfectly well without them.' There is nothing new about this. The intelligentsia has disdained commerce throughout Western history. Homer and Isaiah despised traders. St Paul, St Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther all considered usury a sin. Shakespeare could not bring himself to make the persecuted Shylock a hero. ... Economists like Thorstein Veblen longed to replace the profit motive with a combination of public-spiritedness and centralised government decision-taking. In the 1880s Arnold Toynbee, lecturing working men on the English industrial revolution which had so enriched them, castigated free enterprise capitalism as a 'world of gold=seeking animals, stripped of every human affection' and 'less real than the island of Lilliput'.You can learn a remarkable amount of history from reading this book. He mines the past to understand why progress has happened and where it went off the rails. He covers standard history but he also shines light on some corners that were new to me. Excellent.
The only two drawbacks in this book. This is the first book where he lets some of his prejudices shine through. His earlier books were on biology and the personal opinions didn't protrude into his writing. But here he shows his right wing bias with his occasional taunts that governments are bureaucracies all gone bad. That is foolish. He knows it in the better passages of this book. I will accept that citizens must ever be vigilant against lapses by government, but he overdraws the picture because of his libertarian bias. The other problem is in the preface where he decides to discuss the 2008 financial crisis and gets the facts all wrong. He should know better. He was a director the the English bank Northern Rock that went backrupt. He should know that it was not:
"Markets in assets are so automatically prone to bubbles and crashes that it is hard to design them so they work at all. ... But what made the bubble of the 2000s so much worse than most was government housing and monetary policy."No! This is the Republican party propaganda that ACORN and the GSEs (the Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) caused the problem. That is a lie. The big surge in subprime loans came when Wall Street decided to securitize mortgages creating a flim-flam operation of "tranches" that supposedly turned subprime debt in to AAA debt which was sold to unsuspecting investors around the world. It was purely a case of banks taking excessive risk using a new fangled "financial engineering" trick based on "financial risk models" that were in fact flagrantly inadequate as models of reality. These Wall Street banks colluded with ratings agencies to create AAA ratings for junk mortagages. That's what caused the crash, not "the government housing and monetary policy". Ridley is showing his libertarian prejudice in blaming government and not blaming his rich banker buddies who in fact engaged in securities fraud to create an inflated housing bubble by turning subprime mortgages into supposedly "AAA mortgage bonds".
If you ignore his idiotic libertarian politics and his prejudices against civil government, this book is an excellent read with a great deal of wonderful bits of information that sell the point that it is indeed rational to be optimistic about the future.
2 comments:
Reading some of the reviews and commentaries on the book, I expected to find it, as you suggest, rabidly anti-government. It is not. In fact, it is quite moderate on the libertarianism -- which is by no means an "idiotic" philosophy.
Those interested in Ridley's very good book might also wish to know about my own book, THE CASE FOR RATIONAL OPTIMISM (Transaction Books, Rutgers University, 2009), which makes quite similar points and arguments, but develops the case for optimism over a rather broader range of subject areas. See http://www.fsrcoin.com/k.htm
I can see why you consider Ridley to be a "moderate" libertarian. In your sample chapter to your book you write:
There is much talk about other supposed human rights—to healthcare, education, housing, and so forth. Such notions of social and economic rights raise a lot of tricky issues, of how always limited resources should be divvied up. No one has a “right” to something to be supplied at someone else’s expense.
That is a more extreme libertarian view than most libertarians would take. Most libertarians feel that a state must provide laws and defense. These don't just "pop" into existence. they require taxes to ensure that there are no "free riders". You obviously believe that governments should be "voluntary". That's a myth. Nobody gets to choose their parents and they don't get to choose their government. You learn to "make do" with what you have or you run away from home.
I also find this statement in your sample chapter telling:
But most of us actually don’t question the concept of democracy as an ultimate political ideal. It’s worth talking about why. Some regimes, like North Korea’s, with no elections, call themselves “democratic,” claiming to act on behalf of the people and for their benefit. In reality, the interest such regimes invariably serve is their own power and privilege. But such a government could never truly serve the interests of its citizens because it cannot know them.
You appear to be stating that the US is a "true" democracy and that it serves the interests of its citizens because their representatives "know them". Well, the Congress of 1789 was a rich white man's club. Over time the US Congress has become more representative as it extended the franchise. But even today, it is still mainly a millionaire's club.
You present "democracy" as a simple thing, but historically it has changed. You hold up "Jeffersonian democracy" as some ideal, but I'm afraid Thomas Jefferson would have difficulty recognizing what you attribute to him. He was a slave holder. He wrote wonderful words, but you have to look to actions to understand a man's true meaning.
I can agree with you that governments are oppressive. Where we part company is that I see government as essential to achieve social control and social justice. So I see education, health, housing, roads, waterworks, etc. as government responsibilities. It would appear that you want only a minimal government with no social responsibility. You claim education can be "too expensive". That makes no sense to me. I don't want to live in a society where my neighbors are ignorant and blighted.
Where I do agree with you is in this statement:
A democratic civil society, in contrast, is one with pluralism, rule of law, private property, minority rights, free expression, and decisions made with broad popular participation and debate. Checks and balances serve to disperse power and prevent its concentration. Government is itself subject to law, open, and transparent; there is a basic trust between government and citizens. That’s what democracy really is; it’s not just a political system, it’s a cultural system.
But how can you have a society that respects rights if a large number are ignorant, feel that some among them a sub-human fit only to be slaves, or think that some are heretics and need to be burned at the stake? How do you get tolerance without enlightenment? You want sizzle without paying for the steak. You only get a real democracy with a middle class, education, liberal-mindedness, and security of self and property. You can only have that if there are no deep divisions of injustice, poverty, and intolerance. That requires a state that does more than pass laws and run an army. It requires an obligation to lift the children of the poor out of their misery.
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