[p2p-research] on matt ridley ..

[Ryan Lanham]

I read the book and recommend it.   The shots are cheap and childish...and,
more importantly, have little or nothing to do with the book.  The point of
the book...that news has been overwhelmingly good since World War II is not
discussed at all.  That's because it is simply demonstrable truth.

I am happy to see Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis discussed here.  I
believe I have mentioned one or both before.  Paul Hartzog I think is a big
Elinor Ostrom fan if I am not mistaken.

These people did very good work (all are more or less retired now) and have
influenced my own work on workforce development extensively.  I've actually
explored the 1 time development budget...it isn't realistic, but it is in
the right zone of how to get people to make good decisions about their lives
in an economic sense.

Ryan

On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 1:04 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> on matt ridley's recent book:
> http://crookedtimber.org/2010/06/19/chutzpah-alert/
>
>  Chutzpah alert
>
> by Chris Bertram on June 19, 2010
>
> Sometimes an *ad hominem* attack just seems right. Such is the case with George
> Monbiot’s latest piece on Matt Ridley<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jun/18/matt-ridley-rational-optimist-errors>,
> the Dawkinsite pop-science author. I’ve been aware of Ridley in his
> journalistic capacity for years, but I had no idea that he also had a
> parallel career in banking. Monbiot on Ridley’s *The Rational Optimist* :
>
> In the book, Ridley attacks the “parasitic bureaucracy”, which stifles free
> enterprise and excoriates governments for, among other sins, bailing out big
> corporations. If only the market is left to its own devices, he insists, and
> not stymied by regulations, the outcome will be wonderful for everybody.
> What Ridley glosses over is that before he wrote this book he had an
> opportunity to put his theories into practice. As chairman of Northern Rock,
> he was responsible, according to parliament’s Treasury select committee, for
> a “high-risk, reckless business strategy”. Northern Rock was able to pursue
> this strategy as a result of a “substantial failure of regulation” by the
> state. The wonderful outcome of this experiment was the first run on a
> British bank since 1878, and a £27bn government bail-out. But it’s not just
> Ridley who doesn’t mention the inconvenient disjunction between theory and
> practice: hardly anyone does. His book has now been reviewed dozens of
> times, and almost all the reviewers have either been unaware of his
> demonstration of what happens when his philosophy is applied or too polite
> to mention it.
>
>
>
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-- 
Ryan Lanham
rlanham1963 at gmail.com
Facebook: Ryan_Lanham
P.O. Box 633
Grand Cayman, KY1-1303
Cayman Islands
(345) 916-1712
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