![]() NOW WATCH: Ridley's Honorary Doctoral Degree ceremony and inspiring speech. In his best-selling book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (Fourth Estate, 2010), Matt takes on contemporary pessimism to argue that, in spite of disasters and reverses, the world has been getting better and better for humanity over the last two centuries, and that our quality of life and material wealth will continue to increas. The world has got better in many aspects according to Ridley, but can it go on? What about global warming? Can robots take our jobs? Find out fascinating facts about today’s world and the answer to these intriguing questions. Then he describes the key ingredient he believes has made this positive improvements possible. Later he talks about how much more happier, safer, better fed, cleverer, cleaner and freer we actually are because of the improvements of wealth and living standards. There’s an inherited tendency in the media to only tell you the bad news. ![]() He says, one mustn't have a claim that everything is getting better, because problems like mental disorders and obesity are actually increasing. The Rational Optimist is an anthem, sung by a celestial choir to the tune of the Hallelujah Chorus, of undiluted praise for the free market in cash and ideas, from the stone age to the present. The Rational Optimist will do for economics what Genome did for genomics and will show that the answer to our problems, imagined. His book The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture won the award for the best science book published in 2003 from the National Academies of Science. Ridley shares interesting data on how the world’s economy has grown through time, the extraordinary improvements of living standards that we have evidenced, the decrease of child mortality and poverty in the world, the decline in tuberculosis, guinea worm and other fatal diseases such as cancer and HIV. 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. Matt Ridley’s books have been short-listed for six literary awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It just shows what a different world we are living in from every generation that has lived before.” If you look over five hundred years, the improvements in human living standards is extraordinary and is very recent. In your opinion, has the proportion of people living in extreme poverty halved, doubled, or stayed the same in the last twenty years? The answer might surprise you, and most people choose wrong. ![]() Matt Ridley, honorary doctorate in social sciences of Universidad Francisco Marroquín, and writer of the book The Rational Optimist, describes in this lecture the reasons he has to believe the world has got better in spite of the common fatalist beliefs that our society is worst that ever. Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about why he is optimistic about the future and how trade and specialization explain the evolution of human development over the millennia.
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